By Rebecca E. Burnett, Karen Head, Brandy Ball Blake, Andy
Frazee,
Diane Jakacki, Christopher Ritter, Nirmal Trivedi, and Christopher
Weedman
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This web text discusses three dynamic Writing and Communication Program spaces that serve the entire Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) campus: the Laptop Classroom in the Skiles Classroom Building (Skiles 302), the Communication Center in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, and the Stephen C. Hall Building. These spaces—which encourage both community and collaboration—are not just any spaces that our program happens to be using; these are spaces deliberately designed by us and for us. Working with the Writing and Communication Program throughout both the planning and design stages, the designers and architects were particularly concerned about the match between the physical spaces and our philosophy, our pedagogy, and our research practices. Representatives of our program also worked with interior designers, landscape architects, and information technology experts in determining details. This chapter focuses on physical and digital affordances that contribute to the Writing and Communication Program's core philosophies of rhetoric, process, and multimodality; we also offer, however, implications and conclusions flexible enough for readers at a range of other institutional contexts to consider and apply.