Enrico Giori

Educational environments do more than support instruction. They shape the relationships, interactions, and daily experiences that help students build confidence, communication skills, creativity, empathy, and a sense of belonging. Through intentional planning and design, schools can create spaces that support many forms of connection: between students, across age groups, between learners and adult guides, between students and nature, and between a school and its broader community. The session will highlight practical design strategies that help schools create environments where students feel seen, supported, and prepared to participate in the world beyond the classroom.

FF&E is often treated as a late-stage budget decision, yet it fundamentally shapes how students learn. This session reframes FF&E selection as a cohesive, pedagogically driven process that bridges educational vision and procurement realities, integrating furniture specification alongside space design and finish selection. Emphasizing the critical role of stakeholder input and feedback, participants will explore a framework aligning learning goals, space types, and furniture while navigating procurement constraints to deliver intentional, high-impact solutions.

This session reflects on the origins and evolution of "We Want a School!", a participatory design project developed with students during the 2020–2021 academic year. From the outset, the work was framed not as an activity or design exercise, but as a "provocation" in the Reggio Emilia sense, meant to open questions rather than produce predefined outcomes. Students were asked a simple question: what would your ideal school look like if you could imagine it freely? What emerged was not a set of design solutions, but recurring ideas about belonging, autonomy, care, and the everyday experience of school.