Our favorite tool for designing for whole bodyminds is “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes”.
Caves
Spaces for quiet reflection, introspection and self-directed learning.
Campfires
Spaces for learning with a storyteller – teacher, mentor, elder, expert.
Watering Holes
Spaces for social learning with peers.
Futurist David Thornburg identifies three archetypal learning spaces— the campfire, cave, and watering hole—that schools can use as physical spaces and virtual spaces for student and adult learning.
Australia’s Campfires, Caves, and Watering Holes: Educators on ISTE’s Australian Study Tour Discovered How to Create New Learning and Teaching Environments where Curriculum and Instructional Tools Meet the Digital Age, UNCG NC DOCKS (North Carolina Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship)
“Campfires in Cyberspace” explored the idea that humans have always occupied one of four primordial learning spaces at any given time, ranging from the Campfire (home to the presentation of information by a teacher) to the Watering Hole (the domain of social learning from peers), the Cave (home of reflective construction) and Life (home to the construction of artifacts based on what we have learned).
In Cavendish Space, learners move between these spaces on their own, and computer technology has a positive role to play in each of these learning spaces.
Cavendish Space: psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, flow states, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction.
When students have developed a little bit of metacognitive language around their learning spaces, they are also able to take control of their learning and their learning spaces – they can move to the space that best fits the type of learning that they are doing, and be able to explain exactly why this space is going to help them in achieving their learning goals.
Re-imagining Learning Spaces to inspire contemporary learning – Part One: Models for Change – Linking Learning
We provide caves, campfires, and watering holes so that dandelions, tulips, and orchids alike can find respite from an intense world designed against us.
Caves, campfires, and watering holes are…
- necessary to providing psychological safety and sensory safety.
- necessary to positive niche construction.
- necessary to intermittent collaboration.
- necessary to designing for neurological pluralism.
- essential to our conception of Cavendish Space.
In schools, we find that the cave form of learning is never a priority. This is a serious problem because the millions of dollars spent on many new schools will do little to improve educational outcomes if they are built without cave spaces.
The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash
Developed by an alumni of Xerox PARC in its R&D heyday, “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” have spread to progressive education, progressive workplaces, and the neurodiversity movement. Stimpunk Ryan helped create and run a multi-billion dollar company and a global Open Source community using the ideas that would become Cavendish Space. “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” and “intermittent collaboration” provide core insight into how the creative teams Ryan worked on for 30 years operated.
“Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” and “intermittent collaboration” provide core insight into how creative teams work.
Stimpunk Helen was a classroom teacher working with kids with “Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD)” for 20 years. Helen with her classroom experience and Ryan with his tech team building experience were both working with caves, campfires, and watering holes and intermittent collaboration all those years.
At home, Ryan always liked small spaces. As a kid, he read books under the bed. The small space distanced him from the overload of his physical reality while stories transported him to fantasies and realities beyond his life, body, and experience. His pocket universes, though small in this world, possessed the depth and breadth for a book to unfurl.
He hid in closets. He created pillow and blanket forts and set up house in tool sheds. He sought and created small spaces in a big world of sensory and social overwhelm. He found room to be himself in edges, underneaths, and in-betweens.
Likewise, Helen and her family spent years building niches in their home, building sensory spaces suitable to their bodyminds leveraging Helen’s classroom experience.
We were both making Cavendish Space long before we developed the language for it.
We independently re-discovered the “Timeless Patterns in Primordial Spaces” that have been with us all along.
Cavendish Space can be found in PMLD/SpEd/SEND classrooms as well as in tech companies. What works for early years children also works for adult professionals, of all neurotypes, profiles, and abilities.
What worked for Henry Cavendish works for everyone.
These are timeless patterns of human learning and collaboration that cannot be stifled without harm.
Timeless Patterns in Primordial Spaces
The path to escape the box of a sick society involves rediscovering timeless and minimalistic principles for coordinating creative collaboration.
Bettin, Jorn. The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations (p. 292). S23M Limited.
Could it be that humans have always occupied these diverse learning spaces, moving between them as needed?
From the Campfire to the Holodeck by David Thornburg
NeurodiVentures are a concrete example of an emerging cultural species that provides safe and nurturing environments for divergent thinking, creativity, exploration, and collaborative niche construction. NeurodiVentures are built on timeless and minimalistic principles for coordinating trusted collaboration that predate the emergence of civilisation.
The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations
Cavendish Space = Timeless Patterns in Primordial Spaces
At our learning space, we use Cavendish Space to pursue special interests and intrinsic motivation. We use it to assist attention tunnels so that learners can slip into flow states.
Online and offline, we provide individual spaces as well as community spaces so that learners can progressively socialize according to their interaction capacity.
We use the timeless patterns and primordial spaces used by those who created laser printers, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, and the GUI. We use patterns and spaces that have been with humanity all along. These patterns and spaces are there at the heart of progressive, human-centered education. We repress these timeless patterns to our peril.
Timeless Patterns and Progressive Education
Although our coordinated neuroscientific and classroom studies are still in progress, educating for dispositions of mind is not new—in fact it is highly consistent with a century of educational research and theory (for example, Dewey, Montessori, Bruner, Perkins, Gardner), as well as with Doug’s decades of experience working with successful progressive public secondary schools.
But tying these dispositions to neural development, life success, and mental health gives this effort new urgency, and points us due north in an attempt to reimagine adolescents’ schooling. Evidence suggests that educators can learn to recognize, model, and support the development of these dispositions if they know what kind of narratives to listen for and what kind of learning experiences lead to these patterns of thinking.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
New research on the connections between adolescents’ narrative building and brain development aligns closely with old lessons from progressive practices.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
In short, progressive education isn’t just more engaging than what might be called regressive education; according to decades of research, it’s also more effective — particularly with regard to the kinds of learning that matter most. And that remains true even after taking our cognitive architecture into account.
Cognitive Load Theory: An Unpersuasive Attempt to Justify Direct Instruction – Alfie Kohn
In fact, much as they disagreed on many other things, as they did, Dewey and Russell did agree on what Russell called this “humanistic conception,” with its roots in the Enlightenment, the idea that education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way-an eighteenth-century view that they revived. In other words, providing the circumstances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.
Democracy and Education on JSTOR
Principles of progressivism are timeless pathways that support children to take their place in a democratic society by engaging them actively. This can only happen when educators see value in understanding childhood as they support cognitive, social‐emotional, and physical development, and foster empathy and relationships.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
When learning becomes timeless, it becomes authentically human, owned by learners.
Socol, Ira; Moran, Pam; Ratliff, Chad. Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools (p. 201). Wiley.
These are timeless patterns of human learning and collaboration that cannot be stifled without harm.
We repress these timeless patterns to our peril.
The Triskelion: Our Symbol for Timeless Patterns in Primordial Spaces
This artwork embodies the timeless beauty and significance of the Neolithic Triple Spiral, a symbol that has been revered in various cultures throughout history. The Triskele is an ancient symbol with profound meaning, associated in many cultures with themes such as growth, change, and spiritual development. Its repeating curves symbolize a journey from the outer world to the inner and back again – a representation of the life cycle and the interconnectedness of all things in the universe.
Veskor Cassiopeia
We like the triskelion as a symbol for “Timeless Patterns in Primordial Spaces”. We reclaim it from historical bad actors and restore its timeless humanity. For us, it symbolizes flowing seamlessly between our spaces while staying connected. It symbolizes monotropism, flow states, intermittent collaboration, caves+campfires+watering holes, and more. It is a celebration of the constant flux and fluidity of movement in the world and the possibilities that emerge from spaces between things and connections. The triskelion embraces diversity and difference, seeing the world as a spiral of constantly unfolding newness and potential.
These constantly evolving spirals of feedback and emergence reflect the expanding nature of learning and collaboration.
Perpetual Expanding Spiral of Support and Knowledge
When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal. Fractals—a way to speak of the patterns we see—move from the micro to macro level. The same spirals on sea shells can be found in the shape of galaxies. We must create patterns that cycle upwards. We are microsystems.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.
Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
What is Emergent Strategy? “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions”—I will repeat these words from Nick Obolenksy throughout this book because they are the clearest articulation of emergence that I have come across. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal—the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Octavia wrote novels with young Black women protagonists meeting aliens, surviving apocalypse, evolving into vampires, becoming telepathic networks, time traveling to reckon with slave-owning ancestors. Woven throughout her work are two things: 1) a coherent visionary exploration of humanity and 2) emergent strategies for being better humans.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
The idea of interdependence is that we can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others and they can lean on us. It means we have to decentralize our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
We have to embrace our complexity. We are complex.
I was looking for language and frameworks to use when exploring the kind of leadership Butler’s protagonists practiced, and found them in conversations with ill and Grace about emergence—interdependence, iteration, being in relationship with constantly changing conditions, fractals.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
fractals: the relationship between small and large
A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Rather than narrowing into one path forward, Octavia’s leaders were creating more and more possibilities. Not one perfect path forward, but an abundance of futures, of ways to manage resources together, to be brilliant together.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Fractals are one form of redundancy that has attracted particular attention from scientists. A fractal pattern is one in which the same motif is repeated at differing scales. Picture the frond of a fern, for example: each segment, from the largest at the base of the plant to the tiniest at its tip, is essentially the same shape. Such “self-similar” organization is found not only in plants but also in clouds and flames, sand dunes and mountain ranges, ocean waves and rock formations, the contours of coastlines and the gaps in tree canopies. All these phenomena are structured as forms built of smaller forms built of still smaller forms, an order underlying nature’s apparently casual disarray.
Fractal patterns are much more common in nature than in man-made environments. Moreover, nature’s fractals are of a distinctive kind. Mathematicians rank fractal patterns according to their complexity on a scale from 0 to 3; fractals found in nature tend to fall in a middle range, with a value of between 1.3 and 1.5. Research shows that, when presented with computer-generated fractal patterns, people prefer mid-range fractals to those that are more or less complex. Studies have also demonstrated that looking at these patterns has a soothing effect on the human nervous system; measures of skin conductance reveal a dip in physiological arousal when subjects are shown mid-range fractals. Likewise, people whose brain activity is being recorded with EEG equipment enter a state that researchers call “wakefully relaxed”—simultaneously alert and at ease—when viewing fractals like those found in nature.
There is even evidence that our ability to think clearly and solve problems is enhanced by encounters with these nature-like fractals.
The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul
