Abstract
Many universities are creating new learning spaces designed to encourage interactions among students and faculty in an attempt to foster the kind of creative thinking demanded by today’s innovation economy. These new campus spaces share several characteristics of transversality , Félix Guattari’s descriptor for spatially open, socially interactive, and communal institutions, organized very differently than the spatially segregated, isolating, and hierarchical disciplinary institutions analyzed by Michel Foucault . The trend toward transversality on campus is predicated on the assumption that space itself shapes learning outcomes . To claim that a particular strategy or design will result in specific outcomes is to treat the teaching–learning process like a black box, as theorized by cybernetics, the science of command and control , and this claim shall be investigated in this chapter.
Being in bigger interactive spaces encourages expansive thinking, while being in a box of a room encourages box thinking.
—Dan Huttenlocher, founding dean and vice provost, Cornell Tech
The place of existence, for example a psychiatric hospital, carries out a radical modification of anything, of any order, that appears there.
—Félix Guattari, Psychoanalysis and Transversality
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Watson, J. (2018). The Transversal Campus: Open Black Box?. In: Cole, D., Bradley, J. (eds) Principles of Transversality in Globalization and Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0583-2_2
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