The Harvard Connection

A working partnership with the institution that defines learning research.

For more than a decade, EDI's work has been woven into Harvard's — through publication, instruction, and co-authorship. It is one of the clearest signals that the way we design schools is grounded in serious educational scholarship.

Three distinct threads, one sustained collaboration.

EDI's relationship with Harvard is not a single endorsement or a one-time event. It runs through three separate channels — a book published by Harvard Education Press, a Harvard online course taught to hundreds of thousands of educators, and a co-authored volume developed with one of Harvard's most respected scholars. Together, they connect our architectural practice directly to the research community that studies how people actually learn.

How the connection works

Publication, instruction, and co-authorship.

Three threads, one collaboration

Each thread is sustained and verifiable — a published title, an active course, and a named scholarly collaboration — rather than a passing association.

Harvard Education Press

Prakash Nair's Blueprint for Tomorrow: Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning was published by Harvard Education Press in 2014. Its central argument — that the United States has more than $2 trillion tied up in obsolete "cells and bells" school buildings, and a once-in-a-generation chance to modernize it — made it one of Harvard's most widely read titles on school facility design. A substantially updated second edition is forthcoming in Fall 2026. Both editions are featured below.

HarvardX · Leaders of Learning

Prakash Nair's work features in the HarvardX course Leaders of Learning, offered on edX and led by Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty. The course invites educators to examine their own theories of learning and leadership — and it has reached well over 400,000 learners worldwide, making it one of HarvardX's most subscribed courses.

The Elmore collaboration

Our 2020 book Learning by Design: Live | Play | Engage | Create was developed with the late Dr. Richard F. Elmore, Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education — a collaboration that bridged learning theory and the architectural decisions that bring it to life. The book also carries a foreword by Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs.

The flagship title

Blueprint for Tomorrow — from 2014 to a new edition in 2026.

Fall 2026 · Harvard Education Press · 2nd Edition

Blueprint for Tomorrow

Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning · Prakash Nair

A substantially updated second edition of the book that helped redefine how the world thinks about school buildings. Nair's original argument is brought into today's context — where artificial intelligence, student well-being, climate resilience, universal design, and place-based learning have made the limits of the traditional "cells and bells" model impossible to ignore. A timely roadmap for transforming new and existing facilities into agile "learning buildings" that support connection, collaboration, belonging, and the diverse ways children learn today.

Coming Fall 2026 More on the Books page →

2014 · Harvard Education Press · 1st Edition

Blueprint for Tomorrow

Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning · Prakash Nair

The original edition that framed America's aging school infrastructure as "the $2 trillion mistake." Organized space by space — classrooms, hallways, labs, libraries, cafeterias, and the outdoors — it offers practical, cost-effective strategies for turning obsolete factory-model buildings into environments that support real, student-centered learning. Read the opening chapter free below.

Free chapter (PDF) Buy on Amazon →

HarvardX · edX

Leaders of Learning.

Explore and understand your own theories of learning and leadership, and gain the tools to imagine and build the future of learning. Prakash Nair's work on the design of learning environments features in this Harvard course — one of the most widely subscribed on the entire HarvardX platform.

423,006

Learners enrolled

4.6★

441 reviews

Go deeper

The research and the writing behind the work.

Explore the books See our research