IN-PERSON: Learning. Life. Work

Abstract

Universities, government offices, and businesses are creating smart buildings and spaces, which are integrated with a variety of technologies to improve performance, develop new solutions, and offer insightful analyses. This push of smart spaces emerges from government policy (e.g., E.O. 13693), financial savings, safety, competitive positioning, and modernization. But the learning, living, and working about and within smart spaces in terms of design, application, and improvement are largely unknown to many fields, including educators. Given those considerations, this session offers an interdisciplinary insight about how a team of educators blended the learning, living, and working contexts to develop a workforce trained in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity to address the growing emergence of the Internet of Things, particularly in smart spaces. To democratize learning about smart spaces, these educators take a lay-translated view about these spaces from expert panelists in engineering, criminal justice, education, business, and information technology, who collaborated on the educational components of workforce development. The team explains this project by drawing on Complexity Theory to illuminate the complex, dynamic systems at-play when designing and implementing smart spaces. It captures the non-linear interactions, unpredictable behaviors, and the effects of feedback loops. Ultimately, this analysis is possible because we assembled an interdisciplinary team to tackle a real-world matter of developing a workforce prepared to develop and deploy smart spaces, which requires an understanding of the Internet of Things through artificial intelligence and cybersecurity in non-linear ways.