Hybrid Creative Spaces Pattern Workshop: A Report on Investigation of TACIT Themes and Design Requirements

In July 2023 a unique interdisciplinary workshop brought together leading researchers and practitioners in the emerging field of hybrid learning and working, utilizing design patterns to explore the promises and dilemmas it raises from social, methodological, pedagogic, spatial and technological perspectives. This report presents the results of a pattern workshop on Future Hybrid Creative Spaces (FHCS), held at Irsee in Germany as part of the EuroPLoP 2023 conference. During the first half of the workshop, a group of experts gathered to share their real-world experiences related to various design issues of hybrid creative spaces (i.e. spatial design, pedagogy, and social interaction). In the second half of the workshop, a different group of experts started with reorganizing the selected patterns (from physical, hybrid and digital space domains) by their “creative affordance”. Based on the shared “creative affordance”, new “hybrid patterns” were created using selected patterns from physical and digital spaces. As a result, the experts proposed 13 new hybrid patterns and identified the most important affordances that make a working or learning environment “creative”.


INTRODUCTION
Conventionally, space for creative activities in educational and workplace contexts is often defined as a built formal physical environment; and these environments can also be informal spatial clusters that encourage exchanges and social networks based on in-person interactions.Users perceive and evaluate learning and working spaces through their architectural properties and physical settings (e.g., spatial layout and furnishing, lighting, colors, smells, sounds and technology, status, and image).Nevertheless, in recent years we have seen a significant shift to a more hybrid form for learning and working since the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and many higher educational institutions and organizations are likely to embrace "hybridity" beyond the pandemic.At the same time, "extended reality" has an emerging presence in our everyday life, and with the future of the internet and metaverse, the combination of augmented, virtual, and mixed realities will become an essential medium for social, business, learning and working engagements.Nowadays, the term hybrid space (or blended space) is widely used as an interplay of physical and digital spaces.An urgent call is raised for designers to rethink the current design practice to accommodate future challenges when designing creative spaces in transition to hybrid forms of learning and working.
Existing frameworks which serve as reference for the design of creative space in educational institutions and organizations, have shown some limitations.On one hand, current spatial design theories concerned with hybrid spaces and digital technologies are limited; on the other hand, the analysis of digital technologies' influence on spaces conducted in Information System and Computer Science research fields rarely uses a spatial theory as a foundation.
The current findings have shown that many different socialspatial design solutions exist in both physical and digital spaces, and which are systematically organized as a pattern language.Identified pattern candidates are from specific application domains (e.g., spatial design in built environment and augmented workplace, hybrid education, HCI Design, and game design), and they capture and represent design knowledge of experts.Therefore, the pattern language from Christopher Alexander et al. [1] seems an appropriate approach to bring together design guidance and tools from different disciplines, in a vocabulary that can be shared across disciplines.Through a pattern mining process [2], various pattern frameworks and many pattern candidates that are related to the design of hybrid creative spaces have emerged from the analysis.As a result (see Figure 1), 323 patterns are derived from four disciplines [3].

SETTING AND OBJECTIVES
Prior to the workshop, a list of design requirements of hybrid spaces for creative working and learning (Figure 2) was created by the workshop organizer, via Mining Dialogues conducted in 2022 with nine experts who were practicing or teaching in the creative sector and trying to improve their hybrid experience with their own ingenuity.To better understand what spatial characteristics were required for each hybrid theme, these design requirements were pre-mapped to the five hybrid design themes, territoriality, awareness, control, interaction and transitions (TACIT) [4].The main objectives of this workshop were: • To verify the adequacy of pre-determined design requirements in relation to TACIT hybrid design themes.• To re-organize selected patterns from 4 areas (spatial design in built environment and augmented workplace, hybrid education, and HCI Design), using affordance as an organizing principle.• To collect feedback from the experts on "affordance as organizing principle" and identify the most important affordances that designers should concern when designing hybrid creative spaces.• To create new "hybrid patterns" using selected patterns from physical and digital spaces, according to their shared affordances.• To establish initial interconnections of the essential patterns across all three spatial domains -physical, hybrid and digital.

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE
Apart from the organizers: • Dan Zhu, a PhD researcher at Loughborough University • Peter Friess, an independent researcher and invited camera man by the organizer at the workshop • Cees de Bont (remote), a professor at Loughborough University the two-part workshop attracted a total of 11 participants with background of computer science, business informatics, e-learning and rich experience in their fields.All participants were experts in pattern language, and 6 of them were experienced in designing and implementing hybrid spaces for learning and working at TH Köln.
• Christian Kohls, the president of Hillside Europe, a professor at TH Köln • Mary Tedeschi, an assistant professor at Pace University • Tsvetelina Plummer, a senior agile coach at GfK • Cesare Pautasso, a professor at the University of Lugano • Adrian Schuckart, an employee at PWC • Guido Münsters, a researcher at TH Köln • Beate Anna Münster, a researcher at TH Köln • Dominik Deimel, a researcher at TH Köln • Dennis Dubbert, a researcher at TH Köln • Dennis Christian Wilk, a researcher at TH Köln

Part One: Design Requirements and TACIT
Following a brief introductory presentation, the first part of the workshop took 90 mins and included 6 participants.The participants broke into five groups to verify each of the five TACIT themes (Figure 3) by mapping all possible design requirements to the specific issues given in a form (Figure 4).In addition, each group was asked to provide some known examples accordingly.

Activity 2:
Creating new hybrid patterns.
• Participants worked in pairs.Each pair selected one physical pattern and one digital pattern within an affordance category to create a "hybrid pair" that potentially evolved into a new "hybrid pattern".• Participants used the "hybrid space model" template to document new hybrid patterns.They indicated the pattern sources (input 1 & 2), provided short descriptions and related patterns.Peter Friess was very kind to document the workshop with videos and high-quality photographs (Figure 5).
The follow-up workshop lasted 4 hours and involved a different group of 6 participants from part one (except Christian Kohls).Previously the adequacy of the design requirements was confirmed via part one, upon which two activities in part two were built.During the introduction, "pattern remix" approach, four pattern languages and 16 "creative affordances" were explained.

REFLECTIONS
To answer one of the main research questions in the organizer's ongoing PhD research project, "How future hybrid spaces for creative working and learning can be designed to support collective creativity and innovation?", this workshop can be seen as a necessary step towards the establishment of an interconnected network and a typology for future hybrid creative spaces proposed by Zhu and Ye [3].In general, there were several positive results from the workshop: • The experts confirmed pre-determined correlations between design requirements and TACIT themes, with only minor modifications.• Thanks to their real-life experiences in both HCI and spatial design, the participants were able to map most the patterns from four pattern languages, based on the understanding of the selected patterns and given definitions of the 16 affordances.As seen in the Figure 6, the distributions of patterns from physical, hybrid and digital domains vary in each affordance category.Overall, the creative affordances of the most identified patterns are technology integrity (14.5%), management-ability (12.6%), social-ability (8.2%), tech-support-ability (7.7%), and human centric-ability (6.8%).To be noted that a new affordance informal-ability was proposed in the workshop.In each new hybrid pattern writing template, the "context", "problem", "solution" and "related patterns" were addressed (Figure 7).• Patterns in the digital space domain present a more densely connected network and a moderate degree of hierarchy.A cluster of interconnected patterns can work together as a building block.In Figure 8, a 3D multi-layered pattern network was created to illustrate the existing and new connections across three spatial domains, where the new hybrid patterns function as the connecting nodes.As a result, this multi-layered approach provides designers and researchers with a useful inter-disciplinary pattern network to expand Figure 8: A multilayer network approach for a pattern language of hybrid creative space.
their design knowledge.Furthermore, it sets a ground for future pattern mining for hybrid creative spaces.
The workshop was followed by a few informal discussions and reflections on the advantages and disadvantages of using "creative affordance" as a pattern organization principle, compare with other organization principles (e.g.scale, design process).In particular with Christian Kohls and his team from TH Köln, the conversation had extended to the known technologies that enable the "creative affordances".

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
It has become crucial to address the design issues from both physical and digital spaces in support of the design of FHCS.Using a pattern language approach to bring together useful design guidance and tools from different disciplines.The EuroPLoP conference offered an open and interdisciplinary atmosphere, allowing rich discussions and exchanges among the pattern experts from various background.
Based on current findings, the pattern candidates collected from four disciplines have proven validity in their original contexts, and together they offer a huge potential for solving problems that might not so easily be solvable alone, as interdisciplinary work with patterns is endorsed by many architects and pattern language theorists [5][6][7][8].
Patterns cannot be simply re-mixed, because usually they are not organized by the same principles and follow different levels of abstraction.For example, architecture/spatial patterns are affordancebased and attached to "form", whereas HCI patterns are functionbased and not attached to "form".In this workshop, the affordance model has been selected as a better fit to categorize the patterns under study, considering that it allows an exploration of the usability as a basis for organizing them.A total of 207 patterns from four pattern languages were mapped and analyzed.To be noted as interesting detail, the pattern rear projection (from augmented workspace) was excluded from the mapping exercise, as it was identified being no longer in use due to the current technology advancement.
As a result, 49 patterns in physical space, 71 patterns in digital space, and 87 patterns in hybrid space were mapped to 16 creative affordances.The pattern distribution outcome indicated that among the selected pattern languages, no single pattern language excelled in all creative affordance categories.Nevertheless, designers with a different background can benefit from design solutions proven in other fields.
For the future work, more new hybrid patterns will be created with the same method.Validation of the new hybrid patterns can be done via a writers' workshop or in the real design projects.

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Summary of the 17 new spatial characteristics that facilitate creative learning and working in a hybrid spatial context, and Pre-mapping of design requirement to TACIT hybrid themes (done by the author).

Figure 6 :
Figure 6: Pattern distribution in relation to 16 creative affordances.

•
Physical patterns are form-based, and digital patterns are function-based.Hybrid patterns are somewhat a mix of both.Using affordance as a new organizing model is appropriate for remixing patterns of different disciplines.Based on their own experience, the participants voted the most important affordances that designers should consider when designing future hybrid creative spaces.They were creative label-ability, flexibility, social-ability, and ownership-ability.• In addition to the existing 87 hybrid patterns derived from two pattern languages; 13 new hybrid patterns were created.They are Market display, Speaker's corner, Indicate buddies to join and watch, Who's here, The remote four eyes principle, Gift from a stranger, Work in progress exhibition, Digital info board, Changing labels, Table related sessions, Open inspection, Workspace window, and Popup collaboration.

Figure 7 :
Figure 7: Samples of new hybrid patterns created during the workshop.