About

Rationale

The educational climate is changing

The pace of change continues to increase.  An accredited program of study involves a multi-year commitment which is enriching to those who can afford it, but not universally accessible.  Moreover, students must now ask, not how long their degree will be relevant to the job market, but whether it will be relevant to the job market by the time they graduate.

A sensible response would be to focus university education on classic subjects--math, literature, philosophy, history, and so forth, and consider skill acquisition as a separate recurring initiative, nimble and adaptive.  Learn what you need, when you need, in the most comfortable, sustainable, and efficient way.  Embrace skill acquisition as a lifelong process, not a phase of youth.

Voluntary collaboration on short-term, concrete projects, is not only fun, it's also efficient for learning and for overcoming obstacles.  As in college, you make friends along the way.  And when you finish a project, you've done more than completing an exercise, you've created something neat.  Something you can add to your portfolio.  Thus our motto, "Learn by doing."

A different kind of third place

To entice people into spending time at our enriching collaborative environment, we are remixing some popular themes to create a special place:

• facilities and materials for a wide variety of creative outlets, like maker spaces and art studios

• casual and comfortable spot to hang out, like a local tavern

• easy access to music participation, like a favorite jam session pad

• focus on well being, like a meditation center or a yoga studio

• calm, clean, quiet, stimulating, and safe refuge, like a library

• warmth and curated artistry / ambiance, like a local coffee shop

There are limits to what can be compatibly mixed.  But sometimes it pays to try.  We see tech startups putting fun activities like pool tables and climbing walls inside the workplace.  And let's not forget a famous combo--in 1979, the Elliott Bay Book Company embarked on a new idea, the bookstore café. Two elements that were compelling individually but worked even better combined.  The bookstore café is now a thriving industry.  The best ones are charming, perhaps even eclectic, the kind of perfect place one remembers and revisits.

Fundamental needs, imperfectly met

Co-working spaces try to avoid being seen as cold corporate outposts.  However, the purported community is little more than noise and lack of privacy.  The monthly subscription fees are exorbitant, month after month after month, a level of financial burden not everyone can tolerate.

Maker spaces, too, charge you membership fees, even if you're too busy to show up.  It's yet another drain on the pocketbook, a thing people sometimes pay for but don't use.  And when you do show up, the environment can be too noisy, chaotic, and unpredictable for your liking.  Statistically, women are also less comfortable in many of these spaces.  Within the space, interest in healthy lifestyle matches society's default, which is to say, barely at all.  It's cheaper than a co-working space, but people don't generally stay longer than they need for the task at hand.  They're just there for the tools.

We can fix these things

Our goal is to create a unique space that fosters a comfortable and inclusive culture of creation, collaboration, and completion, in order to fill an unmet need in education and in community space.

Measuring our success

We plan to measure and focus on the following metrics:

• Total number of hours of activities consumed/participated

• Number of collaborative projects completed

• Aggregate learner progress along designed paths of project complexity

Team

We'll have to figure out how team members want to be acknowledged.  TBD.