Institutional Buildings

This term covers "public" buildings such as hospitals, schools, offices etc.

Institutional buildings typically contain people interacting to accomplish a general or specific purpose.

Institutional buildings usually contain large numbers of people.

It may be a feature of the system that the purpose of the building is to change the behaviour of those people within it e.g. mental hospitals, prisons, schools?

Importantly the function of the building may not be the same for all of those who use the building – e.g. clients, patients, inmates, staff may have different needs and functions. One may even get factions within those groups with differing needs again. The needs of different groups may be contradictory or even in direct opposition, such that fulfilling the needs of one group might result in the needs of another group being impossible to attain.

The objectives of the building may be the objectives of the SYSTEM not the people themselves. e.g. the objective of an office block may be to gain the maximum output from the workers at minimal cost and not to provide a "comfortable" environment.

Office building and design

For many years (since 1940s) the study of ergonomics has collected data on human performance and formulated standards on many features of the physical environment. Many thousands of measures made on thousands of people have resulted in statistical averages for e.g. table height for a variety of tasks. Have a look at "old" books on applied psychology for examples of this sort of work (Anastasi - Fields of Applied Psychology is a good one). Today there are many rules and regulations in the workplace which designers and architects are supposed to comply with for health and safety reasons etc. There is also a recognition that not all people fit, or even approximate to the statistical average, and much office furniture is adjustable and that has provided a lucrative business which simply did not exist twenty or thirty years ago.

Propst (1966) looking at a variety of real office environments devised a classification system for working environments. He termed one such an "action office". This had the following characteristics:

A sit-down and a stand-up work surface, to allow change of posture etc.
Files stored at the rear of the desk for easy access
Roll top desks (!) for privacy of papers and personal belongings.
A communications centre – telephone etc
Shelves colour-coded for different materials.
Portable and flexible shelving to allow easy access to files etc.

Fucigna (1967,70) evaluated the action office by asking workers how they worked within them, and also by performing efficiency (time and motion) measures. He found NO gain in efficiency in the action office when measuring percentage of time spent on reading, writing, visiting, sorting and filing. He found some marginal changes in that conferences tended to be shorter (because the operatives had greater access to information and so used other workers less as a source of information). But the research showed that workers liked the action office and preferred the structure, greater organisation, better availability of information, neatness, physical convenience etc. The workers thought that the action office was more efficient, even though the actual measures suggested that it wasn’t!

Ambient office environments

Most real office buildings have a temperature of around 70°F to 72°F. Office workers suggest that 75°F is too warm. Complaints about air-conditioning and its short-comings are frequent. Bad air conditions can lead to irritating physical symptoms, headaches etc. Over active air-conditioning can cause papers to move and draughts etc. Allowing people control over their own area of office so they can set their own temperature/air condition level can bring about improvements in employee satisfaction with their work environments.

Likewise there has been much work done on the effects of daylight v artificial light in offices. Low flicker rate fluorescent lighting can cause eye strain etc. Incandescent bulbs are usually preferred. Best of all workers like daylight, or at least some access to windows. Environmental preference studies suggest that workers like to "look out" from their work. A good "view" is not necessary - just somewhere to "look out" seems to be sufficient. An old idea is that workers shouldn’t have views to distract them, also Victorian schools were built with windows high up to give light to pupils but positioned so that they could not be distracted by the outside world.

Noise is another environmental feature much looked at. Again, most studies of real offices show that noise levels are very seldom of a dangerous level. Workers complain more about the content of conversations than their excessive noise levels. In fact, quiet or whispered conversations are more distracting, presumably because our sensory systems are alerted and we orient towards such sounds but get frustrated because we cannot make full sense of them. And I think there is evidence from studies of how mothers interact with their infants which suggest that quiet and high pitched noises are alerting to mothers and infants, and that infants are particularly sensitive to quiet noises.

Open or closed plan offices?

Examples of open and closed plan offices:

A collection of "closed plan" offices from the Empire State Building in the USA

An example of an "open plan" office layout from Germany

Open plan offices which became popular in the 1970s, are thought

to be economical to run
to be flexible
to have low maintenance
to facilitate interdepartmental communication
to engender a feeling of group cohesiveness
to allow slackers to be seen by others and to be brought into line by conformity pressures
to allow slackers to see good workers as role models and improve their performance (by some sort of mere presence effect?)

Brooks and Kaplan (1972) performed one of the only evaluations of open plan offices known which actually compares work rate and satisfaction in the same group of workers in a before and after fashion. Initially workers completed adjective checklists and rating scale measures. They assessed their current "old" offices and after six months in their new environment repeated the measures.

Findings:

Open plan was not seen as being more efficient or more functional than the old offices.
Privacy declined in the open plan. Visual and auditory privacy suffered and there were many complaints about distracting conversations.
Security decreased in open plan
Open plan was more conducive to social relations.
Open plan was more aesthetically pleasing.
No overall increase in efficiency was measurable.

Schools and learning environments

Again this is a much researched area. Good chapters are around in a variety of texts.

There are a variety of methods used in this area. Many use a quasi-experimental paradigm by teaching students in a variety of classroom settings and then compare students’ performance on tests and exams. I might be one of a kind here, but I do worry about the ethical issues surrounding some of these types of studies.

All of the research in this area is difficult to evaluate I think, because it is hard to have proper control groups of students and it is almost impossible to equate levels of motivation, experience, difficulty of task, ability. And making comparisons across different studies also gets to be problematic.

Class room seating

A typical finding is that of Sommer 1969 who suggests that seating in classrooms influences interaction. Front row students interact more with the teacher than those in the middle or at the back.

Koneya (1974) classified students into interaction types, and concluded that low verbalisers tend to be low verbalisers wherever they sit, and they generally prefer to sit away from the teacher.

Schwebel & Cherlin (1972) claim that students who sit in the front pay better attention and take better notes than those who sit at the back. This study is interesting because they assigned students to seats to attempt to counteract the "personality" and preference variables.

Becker, Sommer, Bee & Oxley (1973) even go so far as to suggest that grades can be predicted from seating position in class, with better grades coming from those in the front middle "action zones" of a class. I don’t know if anyone has done any work on left side/right side of classrooms, but I do remember going to "how to teach classes" when I was a postgraduate student, where I was told to try to ensure that I surveyed all of the students to left and right, because most folk have a natural preferred looking direction (I think mine is to my right) and that students on your non-preferred side feel left out etc.

Studies of students in seminars suggest that seating layouts again have differential effects on interaction. In horseshoe seating, those students opposite the teacher tend to interact more, with those on the ends interacting less. The effect is almost linear with interaction levels decreasing steadily and regularly from the centre to the periphery.

Work by Steinzor (1950) showed the same sort of effects in circles. Those opposite to each other seem to interact well, but interaction is less with those on left and right. This of course does depend on the size of the circle. The larger the circle, the less you tend to interact with the folk to either side of you.

When seminar groups are seated around tables, those sitting at the narrow ends are seen to have more power and authority than those on the long sides. Again those on the ends tend to interact more, and to be the focus of attention.

There is clearly no optimum seating position for all teaching, but it is easy to make certain environments better for specific purposes. Small circles of even numbers of students, (up to six) is good for promoting talk and conversation. Odd numbers of students in groups seem to be poor at encouraging all to talk.

A static fixed layout with the teacher at the front is best for didactic teaching. Better still is to have two concentric semi-circles (one behind the other) with the seating staggered, so that the front row seats are two seat widths apart and the back row seats are behind the gaps in the front row seats. With the teacher at the centre of the semi circle, the set up is complete. This stops student-to-student interaction almost completely, promotes a good view (of the teacher) and ensures that the teacher can see all and that no one is too far away.

Heat and light in classrooms

Heating

Factors like temperature seem to affect learning only a little. Teachers seem to think that lower temperatures increase alertness and the ability of students to concentrate. No conclusive evidence exists about this point. But certainly over-warm conditions are usually associated with sleepiness, although I suspect that there’s probably an interaction with air condition and temperature.

Lighting

There are similar findings here to many other institutional building surveys. Classrooms are today almost universally windowed on one long side, and bricked on the other three sides. As light intensity levels increase visual acuity increases, so one might predict that reading and writing would be easier in brighter light conditions. It seems to be that increases in light levels increase performance on difficult tasks but there’s not such an effect on easy tasks. Over illumination causes glare and eyestrain and reported difficulties with headaches etc. Why do we insist on using white paper? Pale yellow and blue are much better. Likewise a good old piece of educational technology was the dark-coloured board (black or green) with white chalk. Modern white boards have increased glare and are less comfortable to read. The overhead projector may also be less than user-friendly due to glare and legibility difficulties. Most classrooms are today lit with fluorescent tubes and flicker rate fatigue is always a possibility.

Hospital design

Hospitals are often designed for ease of use by staff rather than for patient comfort.

Most hospital designs have changed little in the last few hundred years.

Consider the ground plan of the London Hospital in 1752. This building shows the typical ground plan of long corridor with patient areas at right angles to the central passageway. Washing and other facilities are found at the ends of the building.

The New Wing of St Thomas’s Hospital (1840-42) below is a typical "Nightingale Ward" with long corridor-type dormitory, patients having their beds at right angles to the central axis. Entry to the ward is only at one end, originally to reduce the risks of polluted air spreading to other parts of the hospital. Nurses were stationed in a room next to the doorway, in order to control the comings and goings of patients and visitors. This basic floor-plan is still common today. It is interesting to think that a patient in a hospital 250 years ago would have seen much the same design and layout of building which we have today.

An interior view of a typical "Nightingale" ward

Ronco (1972) claims that the design of long hospital wards is to reduce mobility of the patient, and to give them minimal control over their own space and privacy. He claims that this supervisory effect can lead to dependency which in turn can hinder recovery in many circumstances. Certainly the long corridor (which is common in so many hospital designs) is there to make transport and pushing trolleys easier (not too many corners to go around), and can cause difficulties for patients.

Old style mental hospitals and asylums almost always had long corridors. Most of these had shiny walls, were ill lit, and made good echo-chambers. Imagine being paranoid and wandering down a corridor and being able to hear your own footsteps following you everywhere . . .

Lippert (1971) began a series of investigations of hospital designs. He developed the "tour model" of behaviour. A "tour" is one trip from the nursing station to the patient and back to the station. Within the tour may be "utility stops" for fresh linen, supplies, drugs etc. Nurses tend to spend a large part of their working life "in transit", and excessive travel has been cited as a source of dissatisfaction by ward nurses. Lippert devised his tour measure and looked at the efficiency of varying ward designs. Clearly the most efficient ward design is the one that allows for the most patients visited per tour, with the fewest utility stops. Looking at rectangular wards of various types and also at circular wards he found that the circular layout was more efficient, and was also preferred by the nurses themselves. Interestingly the patients on circular wards, although receiving more attention, and getting slightly (though non-significant) quicker recovery rates; found circular wards to be less preferable than the rectangular ones. The main complaint being that there was less privacy. I guess that the patients might also like circular wards less than rectangular ones because circular ones are unusual, and may be counter to their expectations of what a hospital "should" look like.

Examples of the types of ward layouts which Lippert studied:

Office design Mindmap