Design for Balance: Addressing Challenges of Safety, Privacy and Identity Management in Online and Hybridised Learning and Teaching Spaces

The intrusive nature of digital technologies has rapidly blurred the boundaries between professional, personal, work and family spaces. The safety and privacy challenges, often luridly reported in the media, have spilled into our formal and informal learning and teaching spaces. As we progress towards the new normal of hybridised lifestyles, it has become imperative to design for safety and privacy and manage our identity across different places of activity. What is the design knowledge we need to incorporate to ensure we can safely traverse the new spaces we are creating? In this book chapter the authors suggest a number of design patterns that offer different but complimentary perspectives on safety, privacy and digital identity and draw out their relationship to learning and teaching in hybridised spaces. The patterns presented here are the recurring solutions to some of the problems that arise in hybrid learning spaces and proposes that by using them a general design solution can be adopted. They question the underlying value of the use of the term space and propose digital placemaking as the true challenge to building long-term sustainable hybridised learning and teaching environments.