Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Space as infrastructure: rooms as instruments, not containers

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

Space as infrastructure is the initiative’s claim that the spaces we think in — physical, virtual, and social — are instruments of the work, not containers for it. How a space is designed, configured, and used has a direct bearing on how people think, behave, work, and connect, and on whether they are given permission to think differently: to explore, imagine, and encounter ideas they would not have scheduled. On this account, designing space well is an essential part of developing the understanding, formation, and skills — insight, agility, imagination — that thriving in a technologically complex future demands, and treating space as merely functional quenches exactly what the work exists to catalyze (Andrew Maynard, 2026). The claim has run through the initiative’s practice from the beginning — a community room designed down to its lighting, a class built around pizza and permission, a split-flap display placed to catch passers-by, a podcast engineered as a welcoming room for the ears — and through decades of formation before that. It is written down in one place here for the first time: this is a page where the published record runs behind the thinking, and the practice carries the evidence that essays carry elsewhere in this ring.

The argument

Space is infrastructure for thought. Not a strong metaphor but a working claim: like power or connectivity, space is a precondition that shapes everything built on top of it, and its influence is largest when it goes unnoticed. The initiative holds that the room you are in — its seating, its light, its objects, its signals about what is allowed — bears directly on the quality and kind of thinking that happens there, and that design and configuration are therefore a major player in what the initiative sets out to achieve. Space is one important catalyst among the several this work runs on — conversations, stories, communities, tools — not the whole story; but it is the one institutions most reliably overlook (Philosophy; Andrew Maynard, 2026).

The dangerous default treats space as a container. A room is overhead; its value is occupancy; its design is a facilities question. The initiative regards this framing as both wrong and quenching. Even a container, a designer will tell you, can have beauty, sharpness, a purpose that transcends containment — and a space reduced to pure containment has had the human factored out of it. The reduction is familiar from elsewhere: clothes treated as mere covering, as if expression, dignity, and sense of self were not part of what clothing does; food treated as mere fuel, as if a nutrition pill were an adequate meal. The spaces we inhabit influence us, define us, reflect us, and are part of us — they are integral to what it means to be human, and they need to be designed and treated as such (Andrew Maynard, 2026). That is why this page sits in the ring of an initiative about the future of being human rather than in a facilities manual: a body of work about protecting and growing what is of value to us as humans cannot treat the rooms that thinking happens in as externalities to minimize. And the stakes are institutional: where organizations do not recognize what space does, they restrict their own ability to prepare people for the future in critically important ways — not because of the room itself, but because of how the room influences how people think, innovate, create, work, imagine, and come to understand what it means to be human and to thrive in the future we are creating (Andrew Maynard, 2026).

The operative mechanism is permission. What a designed space grants — before anyone says a word — is permission: to think differently, to explore, to linger, to talk about what isn’t public, or to sit alone and not engage at all. The initiative’s community room, ISTBX 102, was built around exactly this: informal, configurable, comfortable seating; bookshelves stocked to invite serendipitous discovery; a “useless box” and a compound pendulum among its deliberate provocations; freely available coffee, tea, and snacks; staged pictures, decor, and lighting — all with the intent of making a space that catalyzes thinking, interaction, and insight whether you are there alone, with one other person, or in a group, and that explicitly gives you permission not to engage (The room built for serendipity; Andrew Maynard, 2026). Sean Leahy’s built spaces run on the same mechanism, articulated from years of educational design practice: furniture molds behavior — a table ringed with chairs summons meeting-behavior; a large table quietly withholds permission from the lone student who might sit at it; an enclosed corner with a canopy licenses conversations that aren’t for the whole room. Space design, on this account, is designed around how people behave: giving people ways to own their corner of a shared space, choose their mode of engagement, and feel good and energized doing it — and avoiding furniture that photographs well but repels use (Sean Leahy, 2026). The scholarly form of this claim is the affordance — J.J. Gibson’s term for what an environment offers its inhabitant (1979), carried into design by Donald Norman (1988): a room is a set of readable invitations, and people read them before anyone speaks.

From third places to a third space. The genealogy the initiative builds on is credited. Ray Oldenburg, the urban sociologist, coined “third place” in The Great Good Place (1989) for the informal gathering places beyond home and work — the barbershop, the pub, the coffee shop — that he characterized as neutral ground, levelers of hierarchy, homes away from home. The initiative’s usage says “third space” as often as “third place,” and means the Oldenburg lineage by both (distinct scholarly “third spaces” exist and are unrelated: Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial Third Space, Edward Soja’s critical-geography Thirdspace, Kris Gutiérrez’s classroom third space). ISTBX 102 was the initiative’s third space in this sense, opened in early 2023 on ASU’s Tempe campus and intentionally designed to promote unprogrammed thinking, connection, and serendipity — a room built as an argument about what universities could be (The room built for serendipity).

Fourth spaces: the concept, stated. In AI and the Art of Being Human (Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard, 2025, pp. 130–133), the argument takes its next step. Oldenburg was mapping an analog world; the digital platforms that absorbed much of our gathering “optimize for transaction, not relationships; exchange, not emergence,” harvesting attention rather than cultivating presence. Where his third places assumed cultural stability, we are navigating discontinuous change. What is emerging in response, the book argues, is a growing hunger for “fourth spaces”: spaces specifically designed for collective sensemaking around technological change — “Not escapes from AI, but encounters with it—mediated by human presence and shared bewilderment” (p. 131). The book names five design features that distinguish fourth spaces from their third-place ancestors: Algorithm Awareness (making the invisible visible — tracking how AI nudges choices, and how people resist or follow); Intentional Presence (commitment rather than drop-in casualness — showing up matters when the questions demand sustained attention); Productive Friction (gentle resistance to optimization — being there to think, not to solve); Purposeful Purposelessness (resisting instrumental logic — coming to be human together, and letting meaning emerge); and Democracy of Uncertainty (no barriers or hierarchies of expertise — everyone shares the same fundamental bewilderment, and expertise offers perspective, not answers) (pp. 131–132). The chapter develops the idea partly through two community vignettes it explicitly flags as imagined, and anchors it in both authors’ real practice: Jeffrey Abbott’s experience of AI Salon’s free monthly community gatherings around the world, and Andrew’s intergenerational pizza class (below). Its counter-cultural core is stated flat: in a world that worships the frictionless, these spaces deliberately introduce latency — “But it’s in that latency that humanity lives” (p. 132).

The continuum: physical, virtual, social — one design practice. The initiative treats these as a single discipline, not three.

Physical. The room is the fullest case, but the practice scales down to a single artifact: the Vestaboard, a 132-character split-flap display installed in the initiative’s window on ASU’s Cady Mall, cycling through hundreds of quotes and questions about the future of being human — deliberately “slow technology,” human in its scale and operation, chosen because it makes you think rather than doing the cognitive heavy lifting for you, and placed where passers-by could be caught by delight (The Future of Being Human is Analog (AI-readable mirror), 2024-01-07). Space-as-catalyst, at the scale of one object.

Virtual. Modem Futura is designed as a space on three layers at once: the audio space itself, engineered for an immersive quality that pulls a listener in; the recording studio, set up to signal welcome, permission, and relationship — informal, comfortable, reflecting its hosts’ personalities — because the space shapes how Andrew and Sean interact, and that comes across even to someone only listening; and the conversation’s own design, storytelling that opens space in a listener’s head (Andrew Maynard, 2026). The initiative has extended the experiments to immersive media — a public gallery of Apple Vision Pro spatial-video versions of Modem Futura episodes (futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu/spatial/, captured 2026-08-05) — and to readers who are not human at all: this corpus and its machine-readable layers are themselves an exercise in designing legible, welcoming rooms for AIs, an extension the initiative treats as part of its radical creativity — playful on the surface, serious underneath (Writing for AI; Andrew Maynard, 2026). Sean’s stance on virtual environments is a designer’s stance: whatever the medium, a learning space is integral to the learning, and design and intent matter more than the technology — well-designed virtual spaces can be game-changing, while poorly designed ones inhibit learning or, worse, produce its illusion without its persistence (Sean Leahy, 2026).

Social. Some of the initiative’s most deliberate space design has no walls. The pizza class — the weekly intergenerational gathering the book names as Andrew’s working fourth space — is socially engineered with the same care the room was physically engineered: one credit, no prerequisites, conversation over pizza carrying most of the assessment, free passes built in, and explicit permission to participate anywhere on the spectrum “from just eating pizza and listening to being at the center of a mind-bending conversation” (FIS 394 syllabus, Fall 2025; Catalyzing transformative conversations about the future … with pizza? (AI-readable mirror), 2023-05-02). The design wager is stated in the initiative’s teaching philosophy: better a short engagement that keeps resonating — sparking conversations a student is still thinking about a week later — than a three-hour lecture immediately forgotten (Andrew Maynard, 2026; Learning by not trying to learn). And where the physical room falls short, presence itself becomes the space. The Moviegoer’s Guide class watched twelve films whole, together, in ordinary classrooms never designed for shared cinema — “there are things you can learn … from watching complete movies that you can’t get from watching short snippets, or simply reading about them” (FIS 338 syllabus, Fall 2025) — and Andrew’s account of what made it work is spatial: the conviction, shared with many filmmakers, that the physical experience of watching a film with others cannot be reduced to pixels on a screen; the honest admission that the rooms available limited what the course could have been; and the discovery that a host can partly overcome the room — molding the experience through how they engage, the way an actor, comedian, or musician molds a physical space in the minds and emotions of the people inhabiting it. A catalytic space can be created in someone’s mind, when the architecture won’t cooperate (Andrew Maynard, 2026; Sci-fi film as method).

A tradition, not a technique. None of this was assembled from a reading list. These ideas have been part of how Andrew and Sean think for decades, absorbed from an environment of scholarship and practice around space and expressed in what they build rather than carried in citations — formation, not sourcing (Foundations). The traditions their thinking and practice have been formed through are real and worth naming, as traditions: Oldenburg’s third places; the Reggio Emilia schools’ principle of the environment as “the third teacher” (Loris Malaguzzi’s postwar pedagogy, in which the room itself is an active educator); the Danish adventure-playground lineage — C.Th. Sørensen’s skrammellegeplads, proposed in 1931 and first built at Emdrup, Copenhagen, in 1943, on the observation that children preferred construction sites to designed playgrounds; the broader Nordic treatment of unprogrammed space as something worth protecting in law and policy, from Denmark’s 2018 pedagogical curriculum making play a central statutory concept to the codified rights of public access to nature (Sweden’s allemansrätten, constitutional since 1994; Norway’s friluftsloven, 1957); Gibson’s and Norman’s affordances; Gernot Böhme’s aesthetics of atmosphere — designed environments producing feeling; the space-is-never-neutral tradition from Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (1980) through Lefebvre and Massey; and learning-space design as a working professional field. The list is illustrative, not exhaustive — both principals’ formation runs through places inhabited, practices watched, and much more besides reading (Andrew Maynard; Sean Leahy, 2026). There is, arguably, a tendency for this thinking to be more embedded in European institutions and design cultures than in American ones — the initiative states that as an observation, not a law. Sean’s built record carries the tradition into practice: founding director of IgnitED Labs, “an innovative emerging technology laboratory” at ASU (Leahy & Donner, 2020), and of the Digital Maker Studio; and at Thunderbird, courses deliberately organized as foresight studios (Leahy syllabi, captured 2026-08-05) — a word chosen, in Sean’s account, because it conjures a space you are within, one that empowers you and those with you and gives permission to learn in ways that excite and extend you, whether that space is physical, virtual, or created in the community of participants (Sean Leahy, 2026).

The evidence, honestly. The popular case for serendipity-by-architecture is partly lore, and the initiative prefers the honest version. What is robust: Thomas Allen’s finding that communication between colleagues decays steeply with the distance between their desks (Managing the Flow of Technology, 1977) — co-location genuinely matters. What is mythologized: the celebrated creativity of MIT’s Building 20 and the collision-engineering of the Pixar atrium — real design intent wrapped in causal stories that were never measured. And what cuts the other way: the best recent field evidence found that removing spatial boundaries backfires — when two Fortune 500 headquarters went open-plan, face-to-face interaction fell by roughly 70 percent while electronic messaging rose, as people withdrew socially from enforced exposure (Bernstein & Turban, “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2018). The initiative reads that result as support, not refutation: its spaces were never designed to maximize collisions. They were designed to grant permission — including the permission to withdraw, to not engage, to choose one’s mode of encounter. A room that protects unprogrammed, low-pressure choice is close to the opposite of an open plan that enforces visibility, and it is exactly what the withdrawal finding suggests people need. The claims this page makes are permission, presence, and formation claims, not productivity-collision claims — and the difference is the difference between design and marketing.

Where this is going. The thinking here is active scholarship, not a finished doctrine. Andrew is using his sabbatical to dive deep into this territory — pulling together decades of strands of influence, from Nordic approaches to design and space onward, and asking how established concepts around design and space open up new ways of thinking about the intersection of people, technology, and the future: new practices and pathways for navigating advanced technology transitions that do not currently exist (Andrew Maynard, 2026). He designs his own office and working spaces on these principles; Sean has built spaces on them for years; the two are working the question jointly, including the research thread on unprogrammed spaces already noted on the convening page. Like all research, this work is iceberg-like: what is visible is the tip of a much larger, still-fluid body of thinking and practice — this page documents the visible part and says plainly that the rest is in formation.

Lineage

In their own words

“spaces specifically designed for collective sensemaking around technological change. Not escapes from AI, but encounters with it—mediated by human presence and shared bewilderment.” — the book’s definition of fourth spaces, AI and the Art of Being Human (Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard, 2025), p. 131

“I (Andrew) use this “fourth space” approach in my classes and the communities of students I build. For instance, I teach an intergenerational class where undergrads and retirees come together each week to eat pizza and talk about how new technologies are transforming the future. It’s informal, unstructured, diverse, and messy. Yet amidst the uncertainty and “purposeful purposelessness”—along with the intentional presence—something magical happens.” — AI and the Art of Being Human, p. 132

“One of the pillars of the Future of Being Human initiative is the idea that it’s important to create spaces for conversations that transform how people think about the future — and to ensure that these spaces are as inclusive and supportive as possible.” — Catalyzing transformative conversations about the future … with pizza? (AI-readable mirror), 2023-05-02

“This is very much a “slow technology” — it’s made to be savored, to encourage reflection, and it has a simplicity of design and execution that are deeply human-centric. This is a technology that makes you think, rather than doing the cognitive heavy lifting for you.” — on the Vestaboard, The Future of Being Human is Analog (AI-readable mirror), 2024-01-07

Engagement and reception

This page is the first place the initiative’s spatial thinking has been stated whole: the argument has lived in a book chapter, a room, a class design, a podcast’s engineering, and decades of practice rather than in essays, and the initiative regards that as a documentation gap now being closed rather than a sign of the idea’s youth. The room’s effect was, by design, never metricized — its record is the informal testimony of the people who used it (Impact). The fourth-spaces concept entered print in 2025; as of 2026-08-08 our reception record documents no published independent engagement with it yet, and we prefer to say so plainly — an absence of record, not a verdict, and the pattern this ring expects for conceptual work that spreads through practice first (Philosophy). What does exist in the public record: Sean’s built-space work is published in the education-technology literature (Leahy & Donner, SITE proceedings, 2020), the book carrying the fourth-spaces argument is in circulation with a free AI-readable edition, and the initiative’s spaces themselves — the room’s calendar, the board on Cady Mall, the podcast — have operated in public view.

Where to go deeper

The book

The essays

The scholarship the tradition runs through

Related corpus pages