Designing Buildings - The Construction Wiki

Search

Subjects

Tools / info

Edit this article

Last edited 26 Jun 2026

See full history

Main author

Norman Fellows Researcher Website

Edukit: Educational Servicing as Anticipatory Infrastructure

"...the acceptance of educational servicing as continuous, essential feed to the total lifespan, does demand an acceptance of the fact that education together with other essential services must be made available in means and methods comparable with other forms of invisible servicing.
(Cedric Price, ATOM, AD/5/68)

• Diagram 2 - Mockup indicating the possible place of educational servicng. Source: Norman Fellows.

This essay addresses the following question:—

If educational servicing is continuous and lifelong, what kind of infrastructure should support it?

1 • 1.1 What do we know?
2 • 1.2 Why do we care?
3 • 1.3 What can we do?
4 References
5 Related articles on Designing Buildings

[edit] • 1.1 What do we know?

Educational provision has traditionally been organised around institutions such as schools, colleges and universities. Yet Cedric Price's educational projects repeatedly challenged this assumption. In projects such as Potteries Thinkbelt (1966), ATOM (1967) and Detroit Think Grid (1970), education was conceived not as a building type but as a distributed service infrastructure. Price described this approach as educational servicing: a continuous provision extending throughout life rather than a finite period of institutional attendance.

These projects proposed networks of facilities, communications, mobility and access rather than self-contained campuses. Their concern was not the design of educational institutions but the organisation of learning opportunities across territories and communities.

[edit] • 1.2 Why do we care?

More than half a century later, many of the issues identified by Price remain unresolved. Access to learning, regional inequality, technological change, lifelong education and institutional inertia continue to challenge traditional educational models.

The persistence of these issues suggests that the central question is not how to improve existing institutions, but how educational provision itself might be organised. Universities remain important, but they may be understood as one historical form of educational servicing rather than its inevitable destination.

[edit] • 1.3 What can we do?

Edukit explores educational servicing as anticipatory infrastructure. Drawing on the lineage of Potteries Thinkbelt, ATOM and related investigations, it examines how learning provision might be distributed across territories, supported by networks, and organised through adaptive systems capable of evolving over time.

Rather than proposing another university, Edukit continues an investigation into educational servicing as anticipatory infrastructure. In this sense, it is less a project than an ongoing inquiry into the future organisation of learning, access and educational provision. It is presented not as a replacement for existing educational institutions, but as a complementary and anticipatory framework through which educational provision might be extended beyond conventional institutional boundaries.