Designed Learning Spaces
The Designed Learning Spaces at EDspaces are fully realized, interactive classroom environments that demonstrate the latest trends in educational design. Created in collaboration with architects, designers, manufacturers, and dealers/distributors, these spaces are unique to EDspaces because they bring to life innovative concepts in flexible, student-centered learning environments. Attendees can explore and interact with these spaces, experiencing how furniture, technology, and design elements come together to foster collaboration, creativity, and engagement in real-world educational settings.
EDmarket | From Spec to Student: An EDmarket Collaborative Learning Environment
Goal
The EDmarket “From Spec to Student” Classroom brings educators, designers, manufacturers, dealers and students together to explore how the need to work as a team, with each segment bringing a unique perspective, facilitates learning environments to better support today’s learners. At its center is an approximately 900-square-foot middle school classroom, intentionally designed to feel like a real learning environment and surrounded by opportunities to observe, interact, test, and learn. An adjacent outdoor classroom extends learning into a nature-inspired setting, while the surrounding observation and collaboration zone invites EDspaces attendees to watch, participate, discuss, and experience the environments firsthand.
The premise is simple: students learn best when their fundamental needs are met first. The experience explores how the physical environment can support comfort, safety, connection, and belonging — creating a foundation for confidence, independence, achievement, and, ultimately, each learner’s full potential.
Focus: Find Your Comfort Zone
The environment offers a range of furniture types, postures, and group settings so students and participants can find their comfort zone. Rather than assuming one setting works for everyone, learners can experience traditional desks, collaborative tables, sit-to-stand options, active seating, soft seating, individual retreat spaces, small-group settings, and larger social environments. These choices accommodate different bodies, personalities, activities, energy levels, and learning preferences while giving students greater agency and choice in where and how they learn.
Several educator-guided middle school furniture exercises put the concept directly into students’ hands. Students will experience and compare different furniture and learning settings, then share firsthand feedback about where they feel most comfortable, connected, engaged, and ready to learn.
Impact
The EDmarket Collaborative Learning Environment is not designed to prescribe one “ideal classroom.” Instead, it asks a more important question: “What does each learner need to be ready to learn?”
The Lab demonstrates how thoughtful designed environments help students move from comfort and security → connection and belonging → growth and self-actualization.
The result is a living laboratory, where participants can observe, experience, compare, and question how the spaces we create can help every learner find a place where they feel comfortable, supported, and ready to succeed.
Partners (from the Equipment Manufactures Council)
- Clear Touch
- Fomcore
- Natural Pod
- Patcraft
- Smith System & Steelcase Education
Design Team
- Elizabeth Carter-Thibodeaux, Frost-Barber (Dealer Council)
- Mark Beebe, Ratio Design (A&D Council)
Cross-Council Advisory Members
- Bridgitte Alomes, Natural Pod (Equipment Manufactures Council)
- Dave Broz, AIA (A&D Council)
- David Cupolo, St James Intermediate School (Education Council)
- Arden Herrington, Lone Star Furnishings, LLC (Dealer Council)
- Charity Hogrefe, NBS Commercial Interiors (Dealer Council)
- Sue Ann Highland, School Specialty (Dealer Council)
- Earl Metzler, Hertz Furniture, (Dealer Council)
- Lennie Scott-Webber, INSYNC: Education Research + Design (A&D Council)
BVH Architecture | Belonging at Every Scale
Goal:
What if a learning environment could respond to the learner and not the other way around?
Belonging at Every Scale explores how design can support the diverse ways students learn, communicate, move, and connect. Rather than prescribing a single way to learn, the environment offers meaningful choice through space, furniture, technology, acoustics, and sensory experience.
Designed for both students and educators, the classroom recognizes that successful learning goes beyond curriculum. It depends on agency, relationships, comfort, and the ability to access, process, and contribute to information. Five distinct learning zones demonstrate how design can create opportunities to focus, create, connect, explore, and contribute, while giving educators the flexibility to adapt the environment as learning evolves.
Because belonging is more than feeling welcome. It is having a place, a voice, and something meaningful to contribute.
Focus:
This is not a classroom with five zones. It is a learning ecosystem with multiple ways in.
In Focus, learners can concentrate independently or work with a small team. Create supports hands-on experimentation and STEM learning. Connect shifts the emphasis toward communication and relationships. Explore encourages movement, curiosity, and discovery. Contribute expands the classroom outward, creating opportunities for presentation, community, and shared learning.
Across each zone, furniture, technology, acoustics, and spatial scale are deliberately integrated—not as separate systems, but as tools for supporting different learning behaviors.
The environment changes because learning changes. Students can move. Furniture can shift. Technology can transport the experience beyond the walls of the room. Educators can modulate from presentation to collaboration to reflection without asking the space to catch up.
Impact:
The room isn’t designed to accommodate different learners. It is designed to give different learners agency and belonging.
When students can choose the conditions in which they learn best, they develop greater ownership of their education. When educators can easily adapt the environment, they gain greater freedom to respond to learners and teaching strategies in real time.
The impact of this environment is not a new classroom aesthetic. It is a different relationship between people and place—one in which the environment becomes an active participant in teaching and learning.
The ultimate measure of the space is simple: Can every learner find a way to belong, engage, and contribute?
Partners:
BVH Architecture, Smith Systems, Mohawk Group, KCAV
Hollis+ Miller | The Middle Ground: Designing for Transition
Goal
Reimagining existing middle school learning environments without a major renovation can allow students to feel more fully supported as they navigate the trials and tribulations of an academically, social-emotionally and physically challenging time. Focusing on core middle school classrooms and collaborative spaces, this project examines how furniture strategies can address the realities of existing environments while influencing student behavior, engagement, and teacher instruction. Working closely with North Kansas City Schools, we developed prototypes to explore how students transitioning between elementary and high school experience space differently and how classrooms can balance structure with age-appropriate independence.
Focus
Since furniture is often a very visible and impactful investment when budgets are limited, we focused on flexible strategies across three key middle school spaces:
- General education classrooms: moving beyond the traditional front-facing teaching model toward multiple work settings to encourage movement, choice, and autonomy.
- Special education classrooms: designing for the least restrictive environment through varied, sensory-conscious settings balancing structure with flexibility.
- Collaborative/differentiated spaces: repurposing underused areas (like a media center) into destination learning zones for independent work, small group collaboration, and project-based learning.
Impact
By aligning furniture, spatial configuration, and technology purposefully, we can foster diverse instructional approaches, accommodate different learning styles, and meet the evolving needs of middle school students in a unique developmental stage. A variety of furniture types and heights provide students with greater autonomy in selecting the learning setting that best supports their needs, fostering both independence and active participation throughout the school day for both students and teachers. By encouraging movement, collaboration, and choice, we can support increased focus and engagement as well as increased inclusion and confidence for special education students.
Furniture Partners:
- Hertz Furniture (dealer)
- Paragon
- KI
- Fomcore
- WB Manufacturing
- Moore Co.
Flooring Partners:
- Interface Flooring
- FDC Contract
District Partner:
- North Kansas City Schools
Exhibit Concepts + Muzo | The Experiential and Flexible Classroom
Created by Exhibit Concepts, Inc. in partnership with Muzo, the Experiential and Flexible Classroom is an immersive learning environment designed to demonstrate how thoughtful, experiential design can transform the way students learn. Through flexible furnishings, environmental storytelling, and integrated instructional resources, this space explores how the physical classroom can actively encourage engagement, curiosity, creativity, and collaboration. Inspired by early learning environments but designed with learners of all ages in mind, the classroom showcases adaptable ideas that can scale across grade levels, facilities, and budgets.
More than a classroom, it is a living case study that invites EdSpaces attendees to experience firsthand how intentional design can support different teaching and learning styles and inspire practical approaches to future renovations, new construction, and learning environments.
Learning Objectives:
- Explore how experiential learning environments support student engagement, curiosity, and instructional goals.
- Identify practical strategies for implementing immersive learning experiences within varying budget, facility, and operational constraints.
- Evaluate how flexible furniture and adaptable learning environments support multiple teaching and learning styles.
- Apply lessons learned from real-world district projects to future planning, renovation, or new construction initiatives.
Specialty Spaces
At EDspaces Specialty Spaces, you’ll step directly into curated environments built to showcase the future of learning. These immersive zones—designed by leading architects, designers, and manufacturers—aren’t just backdrops. They’re active laboratories, where education sessions unfold inside fully realized specialty classrooms. You’ll experience firsthand how innovative planning, sustainable design, and cutting-edge products converge to shape dynamic, adaptable learning settings. Dive in now — preview the distinct features of each award-winning specialty space and imagine your next breakthrough in educational design.