Photo credit: Eva Rowson

‘Design for knowing and learning’ is the second in a series of salons titled ‘Negotiating Spaces’, a twelve-month investigation into the practice of deliberation, dialogue, contestation and compromise in navigating the urban.

‘Design for knowing and learning’, takes as it’s starting point the public library. Public access to books is not new. In the 19th century the push for a truly public library asserted an access to learning, though this remained a one-size-fits all kind of learning and user. The contemporary library remains at the forefront of the intersection of learning and difference – class, race, gender, though there are many other radical spaces of learning, knowledge production and exchange that enable the complex, the uncertain and the unexpected that gives cities their life. How can informal, peripheral and invisible spaces learn from each other and how might we design new spaces for learning?

Speakers: Suzanne Hall (Research Fellow LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science), Ken Worpole (writer and Emeritus Professor in the Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University), Adam Murray (Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Central Lancashire and co-founder of Preston is my Paris and TENT), Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad (designer, working across products, images and spaces).

Salon curated by Kiera Blakey, Theatrum Mundi, LSE Cities.