My experience with Smart Cities Learning Experience Design (LXD) grew out of my participation in Knowledge Media and Learning (CTL 1926), a graduate-level course led by Professor Jim Slotta at OISE, University of Toronto. The course functioned as a collaborative knowledge community, with students collectively investigating the role of knowledge media in supporting learning and instruction. A central goal was to understand how people learn and how media—both digital and tangible—could be leveraged to scaffold collaboration, knowledge construction, and problem-solving.
Within this context, I took on a leadership role in co-designing and facilitating a multi-session exploration of Smart Cities. Drawing on key literature, including Charles Montgomery’s Happy City (2013), Anthony Townsend’s Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers And The Quest For A New Utopia (2013), and articles on topics such as smart waste management, cognitive buildings, energy consumption, and traffic sensing, I helped curate a comprehensive set of learning materials and experiences to guide participants in tackling real-world innovation challenges. Students selected one of five areas of specialization (i.e. transportation and mobility, buildings and architecture, resource and energy consumption, pollution and waste management, or safety and policing) and completed written reflections and online discussions prior to class. This preparatory work allowed participants to develop domain expertise while enabling interdisciplinary dialogue across the cohort.
The core of the learning experience was the Smart Cities Design Challenge. In the first class session, students worked in their specialist groups to design a city according to defined parameters, producing physical maps using chart paper and post-it notes. These analog artifacts were then digitized, projected onto classroom walls, and layered with digital annotations, transforming the classroom into a shared visual canvas where groups could see one another’s work evolve in real-time. In the following session, students were reorganized into “jigsaw” groups, each containing one representative from every specialization, and tasked with improving upon the city designs. This required them to negotiate trade-offs between energy, mobility, safety, and livability—an authentic simulation of the complex decision-making that underpins urban planning.
This blended approach, oscillating between tangible and digital media, created visible, iterative cycles of idea development. Post-it notes and other physical contributions were photographed, and uploaded to the class wiki, where they remained available as a continuous reference for ongoing collaboration beyond the classroom sessions. The design challenge not only enhanced engagement but also demonstrated how knowledge media can make thinking visible, foster collective problem-solving, and support learning that extends beyond the classroom session.
The value of this approach lay in its alignment with the course’s broader pedagogical goals: to model how knowledge media can transform learning environments by making thinking visible, supporting collaboration across multiple modalities, and linking classroom activities to sustained knowledge building. By orchestrating a design challenge around Smart Cities—an inherently complex, interdisciplinary theme—I was able to highlight how knowledge media can scaffold engagement with messy, real-world problems, fostering deeper collaboration and more creative problem-solving.
This experience had a lasting impact on my professional practice. It reinforced the potential of hybrid learning environments to integrate physical and digital knowledge artifacts in ways that extend learning beyond the immediate classroom. It also reinforced my interest in the design of Future Learning Spaces, where physical and digital media work in concert to support collective understanding, creativity, and innovation.
Alisa Acosta 