What Big Sky Café Is

Big Sky is about designing ways to make sure that some of the time we spend learning, thinking and exploring, makes us more creative, healthy and happy. 

Recreational Learning: Spending time with interesting and stimulating ideas is important to creativity, growth and the enjoyment of life. It contributes to mental and emotional health. It’s also fun.

Recreational Cognitive Space: We can each design at least one personal space (physical, emotional and mental) to give our minds the room, time and inclination for recreation learning.

Big Sky Café is an experiment in supporting the design of Recreational Cognitive Spaces.

Big Sky Café is itself a Recreational Cognitive Space.

Influences:

Many of the design concepts and topics of interest are informed by the Cognitive Sciences - especially psychology, computer science and neuroscience. Ideas in game design, AI, Intelligent Tutoring Agents, Virtual Worlds also come into play.

Thought Experiments and Technology:

A family of computer based systems host and generate some of the material, knowledge engineering, visualizations, analysis, and, eventually shared cognitive spaces in virtual worlds. Some of the software and methodologies focus on specific topics - partly as thought experiments in design. These include experiments in building a personal knowledge of World History, brains-storming, note-taking, travel and cross-cultural engagement, and diary journaling through photography and writing. All of these projects are integrated within a single experimental computer based learning environment. This integration allows exploration of concepts in associative and interdisciplinary learning, and other topics which come into play in creating cognitive spaces.