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| Fredonia's two-year-old, $60 million Science Center |
When you walk into Fredonia's Science Center for the first time, you notice how bright it is. You notice the cafe in the lobby, and you certainly notice the dinosaur statues.
But that's all you'd notice if you only visited once, and you'd have missed the genius hidden in the building's design.
Because on a second visit, you might notice that all the classrooms and labs have glass walls so you can see what's going on inside. If you sat in the lecture hall, you'd notice that the chairs purposely swivel. In one moment, students are listening to a lecture, and in the next they're working with the people in front or behind them (not just their friends sitting next to them).
And if you spent a lot of time in the building, you might need to go to the bathroom. Mysteriously, you'd see the bathrooms are only on one side of the building, and it may be annoying to walk all the way across it to find one.
This is on purpose, as professor Holly Lawson told the Buffalo News: "We wanted to foster intellectual collisions that wouldn't normally happen. The whole idea is to crash into each other and share ideas."
Provost Terry Brown went on: "What we've learned from research over the past three decades, and really what we've always known, is that discovery and learning happen in teams."
Discovery and learning happen in teams, and we can design our lives for this to happen.