Adam Wood presents a healthy dose of provocation in his article about the current state of education architecture in Australia.
The idea that resonated with me the most is the “faddishness of school design” – our fascination with the image of new school architecture.
New school designs also risk following the current trend for ‘Instagrammable’ architecture, buildings that look impressive from the outside but that disappoint inside to the point of being dysfunctional. The big challenge for Australia is to resist the faddishness of school design so problematic internationally, and focus on spaces that are genuinely useful and meaningful for students and teachers.
When developing a set of options for school design, a team researches a collection of visual precedents. These are photos of real examples of room layouts, facades, furniture and surface finishes. At there worst, they are merely a set of images dredged from the internet, with no story. These images are then used to justify to a client any design choices. What we are often missing is the narrative of the user experience.
Decision makers (clients) are often in a situation with high-investment, high stakes, short timelines and marketing pressure for enrolment. The user experience is something much harder to sell and to hook into, even if it is the core reason for a new building. The user experience is less “instagrammable.”
Our students deserve better than simply “that looks good”. Design choices can be articulated in a broader way than simply using imagery. Technology is providing an amazing array of tools to tell the story of new learning spaces.
We can create a rich set of user experience precedents that are complemented by the stock imagery so commonly lauded over. To create “genuinely useful and meaningful spaces” for teachers and learners we have to use narrative, virtualisation and imagery.
The narratives can also serve as the fixed points we use to evaluate the success of educational architecture.
- How have we been able to bring to life these fictional accounts?
- How close to reality were our design stories?
- How do the user experiences compare after one, three, six and twelve months of post-occupancy?
Adam links out from his article to an interview with Adrian Leaman, who runs Building Use Studies and leads a UK educational charity the Usable Buildings Trust, who explains,
In post-occupancy evaluations, we often find that the results for the “Image” variable are much better than almost all the others. The occupants will tell you “It looks good, but it does not work well”. Lipstick on the gorilla was the way one designer described it! A pretty building but thermally it’s horrible, the ventilation’s terrible, the lighting is so-so, it’s very noisy, people want to escape from it and so on. The discourse about architecture and schools is very superficial. There is a reluctance for designers to re-visit buildings to see how they really work, and what people really think about them.
Here are some ideas to broaden the discourse and for us all to consider when we are involved in these projects.
- Observe the time and space of teaching and learning. Immerse your self in teaching and learning, carefully observe how a learning space functions, and how the users make it work for them. Explore the patterns you notice across multiple groups.
- Articulate what your learning community values the most. Share a set of principles about teaching and learning. Explain the hopes and dreams you have for the students in your community. As Ira Socol asks: “What do you want your children to be?”
- Question the story behind the imagery. Spend time exploring the stories portrayed in the images used in the project documentation. Question and probe for the story of the user experience. Don’t settle for “these are just some examples” – example of what experience? How do they articulate the experience we are striving to create?
- Create user experience precedents. Use narrative, imagery and virtual simulations to articulate design ideas. Capture case studies of existing user experience in the school to use as points of evaluation further into the process.
- Establish a framework for evaluation. Commit to pre- and post-occupancy long term, using the existing spaces and user experiences as a baseline. It is often a long road, so ensure it is invested in and referenced throughout the process by all stakeholders.
Image by Ozgu Ozden