Whatever the educational setting – from childcare, to school, high-school, university and other educational typologies... the right environment helps people to engage in learning activities and the wrong environments inhibit learning

There were some wonderful studies in the 1950s and 60s, where researchers followed children around making copious notes on their behaviour. They discovered that children’s games reflected the environments that they found themselves in: if children wanted to play specific games, they would seek out appropriate settings and previous games in the same settings would function like a head-start. It’s hardly a surprise then that the children resisted the idea of playing certain games in the wrong locations. Adults are far more used to forcing themselves to adapt to uncomfortable, unconducive or even unsuitable settings, but compromises don’t make for optimal results – especially if people want to extend themselves, as they should when learning.

Whatever the educational setting – from childcare, to school, high-school, university and other educational typologies, this dynamic means the right environment helps people to engage in learning activities and the wrong environment inhibits learning. 

To some extent you have to learn to decode real-estate talk: for instance a ‘creative space’ generally means a big, empty space, possibly with timber floors and exposed joists above. But whether a space inspires creativity or not depends on the users and what they hope to do there.  Virginia Woolf observed that more than anything else, a writer’s spatial needs are for ‘a room of one's' own, not a shared space with loud, reverberant surfaces.

Psychological Design is an education architecture firm that specialises in the design of learning environments. Learning environments can be crafted in a couple of ways. They can be purposefully designed for specific activities and outcomes or they can be designed to mitigate against specific learning difficulties. Children with autism or attention disorders, for example  require specialised learning environments to get the most out of their learning environments because education in generic settings will be an uphill battle because teachers have to deal with their students’ anxieties, distractions and desires, all of which can be triggered or mitigated by the physical environment.