How Institutional Designers Create Use
Most interiors have been chosen. A person chooses a restaurant, visits a store, and rents an apartment. They leave if the space does not meet their needs. Institutional interiors differ. A child does not choose their classroom, a patient does not choose their ward, and a citizen does not choose the counter at which they will queue. People who occupy these spaces are usually there involuntarily, often at a vulnerable time, and are unable to leave if the environment is hostile to them. This eliminates the market feedback that corrects poor commercial design, which is exactly why the evidence base for institutional design is more important than in any other sector.
How do Institutional Designers create use?
Because occupants cannot leave and thus cannot signal failure, institutional designers create use by designing for measured outcomes rather than preferences. The strongest evidence comes from education, where a study of 153 classrooms and 3,766 students discovered that differences in classroom physical characteristics accounted for 16% of the variation in learning progress over a year, with seven identifiable design parameters.
A comparable body of work linking the physical environment to patient outcomes has been produced by healthcare researchers. The method that follows is consistent: identify the outcome that the institution exists to produce, design the environment around the specific parameters that research has linked to it, and then evaluate it.
Institutional clients are also repeat customers with measurable results, making this the sector in which evidence-based practice is most feasible.
The classroom evidence
The University of Salford's Holistic Evidence and Design project, funded by the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, produced the most rigorous study of its kind in interior design, spanning approximately twelve person-years of work.
Researchers examined 153 classrooms in 27 primary schools across three English regions, comparing detailed physical measurements to the academic progress of the 3,766 students who occupied them over a year. Differences in classroom physical characteristics accounted for 16% of the variation in learning progress in reading, writing, and mathematics.
The authors translated that into something a client could understand. Moving an average child from the least effective to the most effective space was estimated to result in approximately 1.3 sublevels of progress, compared to the two sublevels that a pupil typically achieves in a year (Barrett et al., 2015b). This is not a marginal effect. It means that the room a child sits in influences a significant portion of what they learn.
Seven parameters, three principles
The study identified seven design parameters that all contribute to the effect: light, temperature, air quality, ownership, flexibility, complexity, and color (Barrett et al., 2015a).
These fall under three organizing principles. Naturalness encompasses environmental factors such as light, temperature, and air quality, which support basic functions. Individualization refers to the ability for occupants to recognize and adapt their space, encompassing both ownership and flexibility. The research focuses on calibrating the visual interest of a space, including its complexity and color, rather than maximizing them.
The third principle provides the most counterintuitive guidance. Visual stimulation is not simply superior in greater quantities, and an overly decorated classroom can perform worse than a calmer one. Institutional interiors designed to be welcoming frequently overshoot the mark, where the environment competes with the task.
The finding that puts interiors first
One result deserves special attention from anyone who works on interiors rather than exteriors. Classroom-level design was found to be far more influential than whole-school factors, leading the researchers to conclude that there are rarely good or bad schools, but rather more or less effective classrooms (Barrett et al., 2015b).
The classroom explained the variation, not the school-level analysis. This reverses the typical resource allocation for institutional projects. Budget and attention are focused on the building, its form, facade, and architectural identity. The evidence suggests that the room is where the outcome is decided. There's an encouraging corollary. Many of the significant improvements identified can be implemented at little or no cost (National Center on School Infrastructure, 2026), implying that the constraint is knowledge rather than capital.
The healthcare parallel
Education is not the only institutional sector that conducts research. Healthcare has produced the most substantial body of evidence linking the physical environment to measured outcomes, known as evidence-based design.
A comprehensive review of the research literature looked at hundreds of rigorous studies linking hospital design to patient and staff outcomes, including infection rates, patient falls, medical errors, sleep, pain, stress, and staff effectiveness (Ulrich et al., 2008).
The single study most frequently cited within that tradition discovered that surgical patients with a window view of a natural setting had shorter postoperative stays, received fewer negative evaluative comments in nursing notes, and needed fewer strong analgesics than matched patients facing a brick wall (Ulrich, 1984).
The healthcare literature also shows the cost of getting environmental basics wrong, such as noise disrupting patient sleep, poor lighting contributing to medication errors, and confusing layouts consuming staff time that could be spent on clinical tasks. Both sectors reach the same conclusion. The environment has a measurable impact on outcomes.
Noise is the institutional failure nobody budgets for
Acoustics deserve special consideration in institutional work because the consequences are unusually direct, and the solution is unusually inexpensive. Speech intelligibility is the mechanism through which teaching is delivered to students in the classroom.
According to reviews of classroom acoustics, many teaching spaces have reverberation times and background noise levels that exceed recommended limits, with consequences for listening effort and comprehension that disproportionately affect younger children, those learning in a second language, and those with any degree of hearing impairment (Shield and Dockrell, 2003). A child who mishears half of a lesson has not learned it.
In healthcare, the equivalent finding is about sleep. Ward noise disrupts patient rest at a critical time for recovery, and elevated sound levels have been linked to poorer patient outcomes and higher staff stress in the evidence-based design literature (Ulrich et al., 2008).
The design responses are simple and inexpensive: absorptive ceiling treatment, soft surfaces where hygiene allows, door and partition specification, separation of noisy and quiet functions during the planning stage, and mechanical noise control. None are glamorous; all are cut early as budgets tighten, and their absence is permanent once the building is completed.
Finding your way is part of the service
Institutional buildings fail their users more frequently than any other single mechanism, and the problem is well documented. Research on wayfinding in multi-story buildings found that vertical movement has different cognitive demands than horizontal movement, with persistent difficulties in multilevel navigation even when individual floors are well configured (Hölscher, Meilinger, Vrachliotis, Brösamle, & Knauff, 2006; Hölscher, Brösamle, & Vrachliotis, 2012).
This describes multilevel, multi-departmental buildings such as hospitals, courts, universities, and transportation interchanges. The results are unequally distributed. A frequent visitor becomes familiar with the building.
A first-time visitor, often nervous and sometimes ill, does not. A study comparing familiar and unfamiliar users in an urban setting discovered that locals navigate using established knowledge, whereas visitors rely on prominent landmarks and social spaces for orientation (Yildiz & Sener, 2025). Designing for employees who already understand the layout results in a building that fails everyone else. Configurational analysis can be used to test this prior to construction, as spatial layout alone accounts for a significant portion of movement patterns.
Accessibility is the baseline, not an addition
Because institutions serve entire populations by definition, accessibility cannot be treated as a compliance layer applied after the fact. The World Health Organization included accessibility of environments for people with functional impairments in the core areas of its housing and health guidance, which was supported by a commissioned systematic review (World Health Organization, 2018).
The underlying principle, known as universal design, states that environments should be usable by a wide range of people without requiring adaptation (Story, Mueller, & Mace, 1998). The population of a school, clinic, or public office includes wheelchair users, people with visual and hearing impairments, the elderly, small children, people carrying infants, and people who do not speak the local language.
A design that only works for the average user has failed a sizable minority in a building that they are required to use.
Why this sector rewards evidence
There is a structural reason why institutional design promotes rigorous practice more than commercial or residential work. Institutional clients are repeat customers. A ministry builds many schools, and a health authority many clinics. This creates the conditions for cumulative learning across projects rather than starting from scratch each time. Institutional outcomes are also assessed independently.
Attainment data, infection rates, wait times, and staff retention are all recorded for reasons unrelated to design, allowing a designer to test claims against data already collected by the client rather than commissioning new research. As a result, post-occupancy evaluation is more feasible and valuable here than anywhere else, and it serves as the mechanism by which a practice builds evidence rather than portfolios.
The practice has a long institutional history, having grown significantly through public building projects before expanding into commercial work (Preiser, Rabinowitz, & White, 1988).
The Indonesian dimension
This work has local significance due to two conditions. Indonesia is increasing institutional capacity on a large scale, including substantial public housing and education, with public buildings designed to meet requirements for urban planning, environmental impact, architecture, strength, safety, health, comfort, and accessibility (Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 2023).
When construction volume is high, design decisions repeat, and a parameter that is improved once can be improved across many buildings. Tropical adaptation is more important in institutions than elsewhere. Because naturalness parameters such as temperature and air quality account for a large portion of the classroom effect, and because much of Indonesia's institutional space is naturally ventilated, cross ventilation, shading, ceiling height, and orientation are more important design responses than cooling capacity.
According to research on adaptive thermal comfort, occupants of naturally ventilated buildings accept a wider temperature range related to outdoor conditions (de Dear & Brager, 1998), making comfortable naturally ventilated classrooms a reality rather than an aspiration.
A classroom that is too hot to concentrate in is losing some of that 16 percent, which is a design issue with low-cost solutions.
The limits
Three qualifications.
Sixteen percent is not everything. The Barrett research is explicit that classroom design explains a meaningful minority of variation in learning progress. Teaching quality, home circumstances, and individual differences account for considerably more, and a designer who overstates the claim invites justified skepticism.
Effects are context dependent. Reviews of school environment research have noted considerable methodological variation across studies and cautioned against transferring findings between settings without adjustment (Higgins, Hall, Wall, Woolner, & McCaughey, 2005). The classroom study was conducted in United Kingdom primary schools, and parameters such as temperature and color require reinterpretation in different climates and cultures.
Institutional budgets are political. Evidence for an intervention does not guarantee funding, and the designer's task frequently includes making the case in terms a public budget holder can defend.
What the discipline requires
Institutional design necessitates capabilities that decorative training does not provide. Evidence literacy refers to the ability to read research and apply it without overclaiming.
Technical knowledge of the environmental parameters that cause the observed effects. Because the user population does not choose itself, inclusive design is essential. Wayfinding and spatial reasoning are required because these buildings are large and the users are unfamiliar. And the ability to argue for specification against a budget that treats it as optional.
Studying Interior Design alongside Psychology, Business Administration, and Visual Communication Design strengthens the connection between environmental decisions and human outcomes, the funding case, and the signage and information design that underpins institutional navigation (Raffles Jakarta, 2026a; Raffles Jakarta, 2026b).
Teaching by practicing professionals is important because public sector procurement and standards are learned in practice (Raffles Jakarta, 2026c), and industrial attachment through the Center of Professional Development places students in buildings where they can observe rather than assume (Raffles Jakarta, 2026d). The phrase in the title is precise. In a shop, use is optional, and designers compete for it. In a school, a clinic, or a public building, use is required, and the designer determines how much that use costs the person who must make it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does classroom design affect learning?
A study of 153 classrooms and 3,766 students from 27 primary schools discovered that differences in classroom physical characteristics explained 16% of the variation in learning progress over a year in reading, writing, and mathematics. Moving an average child from the least to the most effective space was estimated to be worth approximately 1.3 sublevels, versus two sublevels of typical annual progress.
Which design factors matter most in classrooms?
The study identified seven variables: light, temperature, air quality, ownership, flexibility, complexity, and color. These are divided into three principles: naturalness, which addresses environmental conditions, individualization, which addresses whether occupants can personalize the space, and stimulation, which addresses visual interest, which necessitates calibration rather than maximization.
Does the building or the room matter more?
The room. Classroom-level design was discovered to be far more influential than overall school factors, leading the researchers to conclude that there are rarely good or bad schools, but rather more or less effective classrooms.
This reverses the traditional focus of budget and attention on building-level architecture.
Is there similar evidence in healthcare?
Yes. A comprehensive review of the research literature looked at hundreds of rigorous studies that linked hospital design to outcomes such as infection rates, patient falls, medical errors, sleep, pain, and staff effectiveness. The most frequently cited individual study discovered that surgical patients with a natural window view had shorter stays and required fewer strong analgesics than those facing a brick wall.
Why is wayfinding such a problem in institutional buildings?
Because these buildings are typically large, multilevel, and multi-departmental, research has shown that multilevel navigation remains difficult even when individual floors are well-designed. The burden is borne by unfamiliar visitors, who rely on landmarks and orientation cues, whereas staff who are familiar with the layout do not suffer from the failure.
Are these improvements expensive?
Often not. The classroom research discovered that many significant improvements can be made at little or no cost, implying that the limiting factor is typically knowledge of which parameters are important rather than available capital.
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References
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