The aim of the “Learning” competition was to develop design proposals for the university, intended as a space of higher education, training, and teaching on all levels and disciplines.

The participants were asked to create innovative and unconventional projects on this theme, questioning the very basis of the notion of the university. recently a series of new initiatives have emerged in relation to the learning experience.

The digitalization of education empowered processes of serious gaming as a learning tool, through app and interface, while video tutorials introduced a brand new dimension of bottom-up knowledge sharing movements. Organizations like Coursera, Ted, and Edx managed to grasp the qualities of remote learning and translated them into professional educational tools, providing online courses and lectures for anyone around the world. Along the same line, many universities started providing entire programs online, reducing costs and giving large flexibility to their students. On the other hand, many institutions still rely and invest in direct human interaction as the main vehicle for education. Innovation operates by empowering not only the teacher-student relationship, but also the potential for collaboration and mutual motivation between learners, trans-disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity in the outside world.

Within this context, with critical thinking and a creative attitude, participants were urged to investigate what kind of spatial qualities can support or empower the process of learning in the future. Designers were asked to merge considerable programmatic innovation and valuable design tools. The proposal could be a device, piece of furniture, interior design project, pavilion, building, urban plan or something other. The scale of intervention, program dimensions and location were not given and they were chosen by the participants to better suit their project.