How the Gymnasium Can Serve as a Model for Learning Space Design

• By Jay Lyons
• 05/05/26

Campus facilities teams have long understood something that their AV and IT counterparts are only now being asked to fully reckon with: Space is finite, and the demands on it are not.

Walk into any school gymnasium and you will find a space designed to flex. The same gym that hosts a basketball game on Thursday night becomes a PE class on Friday afternoon and a graduation venue by Saturday morning. The infrastructure was designed with that range in mind, which means the chairs, the lighting, and the AV equipment all have to work across contexts without requiring a full reset each time. No one expects a separate gym for each use case. The expectation is adaptability, built in from the start.

Learning Spaces Have Not Kept Pace

Now look at the typical higher ed learning space. Most were designed for a single modality, a single era, and a single type of student interaction. They were not built to flex. And yet, higher education now asks these rooms to support in-person instruction, live hybrid sessions, asynchronous recording, overflow viewing, and sometimes all of the above within the same week. The space did not change. The demands did.

This is the challenge that IT and AV leaders are being handed today, often without the budget to build new rooms and without the institutional runway to do a full technology overhaul. The stakes of falling short are significant: Research from AVIXA and Logitech found that one in three faculty and one in four students have considered leaving their institution due to poor technology. For administrators already contending with enrollment pressure, that is not just a technology problem. The implications reach well beyond it.

2 Design Principles that Change the Equation

The answer, increasingly, comes down to two things: interoperability and adaptability.

Interoperability is not a new concept for AV and IT teams, but it takes on a different meaning in the context of multipurpose space design. It is about whether a room's technology works with the platforms and systems an institution already has in place, not just in a narrow technical sense, but in practice, for the faculty member who simply needs to start a class. That includes prioritizing solutions designed with platform flexibility in mind at the point of deployment, so that the room can serve the institution's existing ecosystem rather than requiring it to bend. When technology integrates smoothly into what is already there, institutions reduce training burden, lower the barriers to adoption, and make it possible to deploy consistently across a wide range of spaces without reinventing the setup each time.

Adaptability, meanwhile, is about anticipating change rather than reacting to it. The institutions navigating this moment successfully are not the ones with the most advanced equipment. They are the ones where the technology choices leave room to grow. That might mean deploying management tools that give IT teams visibility across a portfolio of rooms so that a software update or a configuration change does not require a technician in every space. It might simply mean choosing solutions that faculty can operate without an instruction manual, because ease of use itself enables adaptability, making it easier to tailor a room to the needs of whatever is happening in it that day.

Design for Every User, Not Just the Expert

The school gymnasium analogy holds here too. No one designs a multipurpose gym assuming that only trained staff will ever operate the sound system. The controls are built for whoever walks in, across a wide range of events and users. Learning spaces deserve the same design consideration.

What makes this moment different is that IT and AV leaders now have both the evidence and the standing to make the case for it. The pressure these teams are absorbing is ultimately an institutional one, and the data backs them up.

Multipurpose gyms work because flexibility was built into the brief from the start, not retrofitted later. The same logic applies to academic spaces. Institutions that involve IT and AV in learning space decisions early, before the infrastructure is set and the technology is chosen, will be far better positioned to build rooms that hold up across whatever comes next.