Bringing education to real-life settings through “occupation”
For the first time in history, the world’s first educational pop-up space took place at the entrance of a Stockholm hospital on September 11 and 12. The Stockholm Entrepreneurship-lab (which is a collaboration between local and cross-CLC Partners) is launching mobile education spaces where the key concepts are co-creation, hands-on learning and incubation of student ideas. The Co-up lab aims to transform tomorrow’s healthcare by transforming today’s education.
This year the Stockholm E-lab is exploring creative spaces, pushing the limits of what we as educators refer to when we discuss “real-life” challenges in education.
Through the Co-up lab we wish to challenge and evolve ideas of what a creative educational space is & how we can create platforms where “co-creation” is an educational tool. The Co-up lab are piloting a mobile makerspace utilized for education in health care innovation.
Students in the semester-long incubation programme “The Co-up lab” will go through a process based on the design thinking methodology. Each of the steps of the design process is accompanied by education in a “Co-up lab space” that “pops-up” a suitable location. The empathy step took place in the main entrance hall of the south hospital (SöS), the host was the innovation hub at the hospital.
During the first day the students were guided through how to use the space and how to understand empathy when working in a hospital context.
During the second day they were free to use the space as their hub, expanding and returning to evaluate their findings and using the material present in the lab. Passers-by that became visitors of the space were not just interview objects. They became guests that listen in on educational activities or played with the prototyping material.
From our first event, we can conclude that is works surprisingly well as to create a real life hands-on education space. What the Co-up lab also manifests is how education can be a tool to bring stakeholders together and also how education naturally can be a reach-out platform to citizens.
Anna Birgersson
