Toward an innovative learning environment to support educational facilities. Spaces and services fostering interactions in the community of the campus.

The learning environment is going toward new directions due to the new pedagogical approaches of the "active learning" strand, and to stimulate new human behaviors and relationships that break down the definitions of roles and barriers in the campus, and the connection is total of the entire social system. The very concept of education is expanded as an act that can happen anywhere and at any time (D. Oblinger, J.L. Oblinger, J.K. Lippincott, 2005). New learning dynamics lead to the definition of spaces intended for formal learning, such as classrooms or laboratories, for a planned didactics conveyed through the traditional lesson of a teacher. Informal spaces, on the other hand, include a wide range of places where the exchange of knowledge takes place through the study and cooperation of students or researchers, who are located in "the space between” or those places characterized by a great design flexibility that allows the discovery of new environments devoted to group study and that act as a filter between the different functions in the Campus. All these new behaviors need, however, a new reflection on the physical environment. There are new ways of living, working, meeting and enjoying are evolving the concept of the campus, triggering connectivity, and the ability to experience in a fluid and strategic way, need to be supported by environments to guarantee motivation, flexibility, personalization, collaboration, and good behaviors. Since colleges and universities around the world are facing the challenges of rethinking higher education facilities, to respond to the emerging needs, this paper focuses on the evolving requirements of learning spaces to become spatial supports able to make educational experience malleable by the users involved. It will present experimentation on an on-going research project at the Politecnico di Milano Campus(Italy), aiming at defining a set of parameters in order to build a “Grammar” for an innovative learning environment. The expected results aim at a rethinking of the spatial model that supports the learning environment within this continuous mechanism of interaction between people and space, to foster new forms of interaction, collaboration and multidisciplinary for the future growth of the Campus.