BLiQ

Context.

Teacher training in Germany operates largely as it has for decades. The institutions responsible for qualifying and developing educators were designed for a stable world: predictable curricula, fixed classroom formats, slow-changing pedagogy. That world no longer exists.

The State of Berlin recognised the problem and committed to building something entirely new: BLiQ, a Berlin State Institute for Qualification and Quality Development in schools. Not a reform of the existing system. A ground-up rethinking of how thousands of current and future teachers learn, collaborate, and develop, and of the physical and digital environment that would make that possible.

Malpaux was brought in by Prof. Dr. Jörg Kayser at the earliest stage of the project, before it had been announced internally, to help shape what that could become.

Why this.

We got started on the science fair projects that became the basis for our later ventures because a couple of amazing teachers inspired us to do so. Good teachers change lives.

Jörg Kayser approached us about an institute meant to give teachers like these the space to become the best they can be. As they were building something new anyway, we saw the opportunity to force some fresh ideas into a senate-backed system that wasn’t necessarily welcoming change.

Problem.

The challenge wasn't primarily technical. It was conceptual: what should a 21st-century teacher-training institution actually look like and feel like, and how should it work — spatially, digitally, and organisationally?

The risk with a project of this kind is that ambition collapses into convention. Public institutions under political and budgetary scrutiny tend to default toward the familiar. Without a clear and compelling vision established early, one grounded in research and expressed concretely, the gravitational pull toward the status quo is very hard to resist once architecture firms, procurement processes, and committee structures get involved.

The window for genuine innovation was at the beginning, before the plans were fixed.

Constraints and complexity.

Public sector timelines and governance. BLiQ operates inside a state government structure with multiple stakeholders, approval layers, and a long planning horizon. The ideas Malpaux contributed needed to be innovative enough to shift the direction of the project while being legible and credible to decision-makers who weren't operating in a startup context.

The brief didn't exist yet. Malpaux was engaged before the project was publicly defined, contributing to the vision that would eventually become the brief. That requires a different kind of thinking: not solving a stated problem, but articulating the right problem in the first place.

Spatial and digital thinking had to work together. How people move through and inhabit a building shapes what kinds of learning and collaboration are possible. How digital infrastructure is designed shapes what the physical space can do. The two couldn't be designed independently. The conceptual work had to hold both simultaneously.

Designing for a fast-changing world. Any institution built today for teachers will be teaching differently by the time it opens. The design needed to be flexible and adaptive by principle, not optimised for a single pedagogical model that might already be outdated.

What we did.

Malpaux contributed spatial and digital concept work at the foundational stage of the BLiQ project, helping to establish the vision before it hardened into plans.

Spatial concept. We developed early visions for how people would interact in the new building: how spaces could be configured for different modes of work, how the layout could support both structured training and informal collaboration, and how the physical environment could signal and enable a different kind of institutional culture. This work drew on current research into flexible, adaptive learning environments.

Digital concept. Alongside the spatial work, we developed thinking on how digital infrastructure and tools could integrate with the physical space as a core part of how the institute would function.

Vision communication. Part of the work was articulating the scale of the opportunity and helping the project's internal champions communicate what BLiQ could be before most stakeholders had seen anything. That communication work is often undervalued in public sector projects, but it's frequently what determines whether ambition survives the planning process.

Outcomes.

BLiQ officially opened its doors on January 29, 2025. A significant portion of Malpaux's early thinking on ways of working, spatial layout, and the overall vision persisted into the final building. This is most visible in its open room layout with shared spaces oriented around collaboration, an approach that runs counter to the cellular office culture typical of Berlin's senate buildings.

The project continues to evolve and will develop over the coming years as Berlin moves through implementation.

Lessons.

The earliest stage is where influence is highest and presence is lowest. In large public and institutional projects, the concepts established before formal planning begins have disproportionate staying power. Most operators engage too late, after the structure is already set. Getting in at the vision stage, when almost nothing is decided, grants tangible leverage.

Systems thinking applies to institutions, not just products. The work at BLiQ required the same kind of integrated thinking Malpaux brings to product and technology engagements: understanding how spatial design, digital infrastructure, organisational culture, and pedagogical philosophy interact as a system, and intervening at the level where those interactions are being decided.

Public sector work demands a different kind of communication. Ideas that would be self-evident to a founder team or product organisation need to be translated for a committee, a procurement process, and a political sponsor simultaneously. The ability to move between those registers, without diluting the ambition, is a distinct skill.

Persistence is the work in public sector projects. The gravitational pull toward the familiar is constant and structural. The right idea, presented once, rarely survives. The same idea, reintroduced at each stage, sometimes does. Not everything we pushed for made it into the final building. But some things did, and they are now built into a state institution that will shape how thousands of teachers learn and work for decades. In public sector work, that's the win condition: the survival of the ideas that matter most through a process unintentionally designed to wear them down.

Vision documents are underrated as strategic tools. The work Malpaux contributed wasn't a report or a proposal in the conventional sense. It was a concrete, vivid picture of what BLiQ could become, specific enough to be buildable, ambitious enough to pull the project toward something genuinely new. That kind of artefact travels through organisations in ways that abstract recommendations don't.