“Children are wonderfully sensitive to nuances in both lighting and color,” he says. As for which specific colors work best, Fielding doesn’t discriminate. “All colors,” like all students, he says, “are good.”

Background & Context:

Recently, DesignShare colleagues Dr. Jeff Lackney, Randy Fielding, and Prakash Nair were debating just how much ‘color’ factors — positively or negatively — into the design of the learning environment. All of this grew out of an article that Randy was quoted in called “Color in the Classroom: How schools are using color to create ready-to-learn environments” which was written by Andrea Grazzini Walstrom for the Sherwin Williams “Stir” magazine (tagline: “Where color and creativity converge”).

Jeff - playing the devil’s advocate - asked Randy about the research that supported his statements. A terrific debate soon took shape between 3 of the world’s leaders in the field of school planning/design.

Even more importantly, a debate on the need to balance instinct and research between Jeff, Randy, and Prakash grew out of the belief that our industry must re-imagine the use of color schemes so often applied in the design of learning environments. DesignShare, of course, saw a wonderful opportunity to publish this debate and frame it as ‘chapter 1′ of a larger discussion. And, of course, invite others to share opinion, research, or both the further the conversation!

*****

Where it all started:

“Color in the Classroom: How schools are using color to create ready-to-learn environments” (debate follows):

By Andrea Grazzini Walstrom

Classroom decor can range from the crayon-bright interiors of preschools to the gray terrazzo floors and white-washed block walls still seen in many old high schools. When it comes to learning, does color matter?

The current consensus is that what a student hears, feels and smells has a significant impact on his or her learning. Brain-based learning, the latest buzz in education, is, at its core, learning via the senses.

“We know that color is one of the key elements in a stimulus–rich learning environment,” says Randy Fielding, chairman of Fielding Nair International, a Minneapolis planning and design firm specializing in education environments. According to Fielding, founder of DesignShare.com, a resource for designers of learning environments, research shows that students learn best in color-filled settings.

“A well-planned palette offers a broad range of colors,” he says, including serene blue or green shades combined with more stimulating reds, oranges or yellows. “Utilizing lighter tones in combination with deeper accent colors creates a dynamic sense of place.”

Functional color, which prioritizes educational results before aesthetics, focuses on such learning enhancements as reducing eye strain and increasing attention spans. For the majority of students, high contrasts are stimulating, while lighter tones can promote focus. One study even indicated that monotonous color schemes increase the rate of student absenteeism.

The key to creating ready-to-learn environments, says Fielding, is a variety of colors and a range of color intensity, including some hues used as way-finders and culture-builders in common areas.

“In a cold climate, warm, earthy tones invite students and teachers to nestle into a cozy cafe area, for engaging in both reflective and collaborative learning,” he says. “In warmer climates, a cooler palette in a cafe or gathering area can invite students to relax and flex their interpersonal intelligence.”

Fielding also debunks a few commonly held assumptions about color’s impact. “Red doesn’t hyper-stimulate,” he says; too much soothing green may dull, rather than relax, the senses. And bright primary colors, long presumed to be elementary-age favorites, can be too harsh and should be used only sparingly. “Children are wonderfully sensitive to nuances in both lighting and color,” he says. As for which specific colors work best, Fielding doesn’t discriminate. “All colors,” like all students, he says, “are good.”

The ‘Colorful’ Debate between Jeff Lackney, Randy Fielding, and Prakash Nair:

Jeff Lackney:

Playing the devil and evidence-based researcher advocate, Randy, I wonder where your ideas are coming from. Simply saying it doesn’t make it so.

What evidence can you provide to back up your statements. As much as I agree with you, there IS lots of research over the years that claims the opposite.

Randy Fielding:

Glad you asked, Jeff.

I ordered a 1/2 dozen of the most-referenced books and research studies on color and behavior 5 years ago, accessing various university systems. The current research negating emerging views of color seems extremely weak, in my opinion. For example, the ‘evidence’ against using red seems as strong as the ‘evidence’ that is still used to suggest that windows are bad in classrooms because they distract students from learning.

Over the years, I’ve read shorter pieces perpetuating these myths, but I’ve never seen a convincing study.

Find me a graduate student and test environment to do the work, and I’ll happily get involved in the study. Two suggested locations for such research: Yeshiva Elementary in Milwaukee and Scotch Oackburn College in Tasmania.

Regarding your challenge, Jeff: I believe that our work at FNI stands for itself.

Do you trust your eyes, your own feelings? Do you believe that the color palette that you saw at the recent ALESI prototype will contribute to aggression?

Jeff Lackney:

I agree with your assessment of the research. Glad you did that research. Maybe we can post some of it along with your article for those ’skeptics’ out there to help make your arguments stronger out of the gate. Perhaps it feels academic to you maybe, but it creates a stronger argument than merely ‘debunking’ such myths without making the case from the point of evidence.

Regarding the question of trusting one’s instincts/eyes, I think its ALWAYS better to have both sides of an argument to make something stronger in the end. Let’s not throw out our rational selves out just yet, even if we agree on an anecdotal level!

Prakash Nair:

Well, here is my admittedly non-research based response.

With the ALESI project, I kept getting superlatives on the colors we choose. In fact, more than any other element of the design, what people responded to me most about was the colors.

I could have thought this was an abberation. Easy to assume people really prefer the ‘neutral’ colors that schools traditionally use, but then I saw the Denver School of Science and Technology video (from the American Architectural Foundation’s “Great Schools By Design” initiative) where the students eyes light up when they start talking about the colors. What is interesting is that even after one year of being in the school, they are still talking about the colors.

And onto my third case — Scotch Oakburn College. [Note: Take a visual tour here]

I heard from almost everyone I talked to that the colors are amazing. I heard a lot of superlatives when they talked about the colors. In fact, I used a few superlatives myself including “mouth-watering” after I saw the building myself And since I have seen hundreds of schools with the typical school paints, I can tell you that SOC was very different.

I agree completely with Randy. Let us not abandon common sense here in this conversation. Childrens’ excitement about colorful spaces, as well as our own well-honed sense of what is and is not aesthetic, must remain present, rather than simply blindly following what some researcher may be saying.

Remember, windowless schools? Well, they built dozens of them (including the 2,000-student Albany High School in New York, which is on the verge of being demolished, finally) because of the ‘evidence’ that windows will distract kids. If asked, the common guy on the street, would have said ,”Forget the research if that is what it is telling me. I trust my own judgment and instincts enough to know that windows are important.”

Likewise, my own judgment and instincts say, keep the colors coming for the kids. Colors are great. Frankly, the more the merrier.

Jeff Lackney:

Let me re-state something key here before we get too far into anecdote vs. research. Let’s not throw baby (rational thinking) out with the bath water as we build our argument.

I know research is tossed around by you guys when it supports your ‘common sense view’. I actually tend to agree with Randy here, but you didn’t hear that point of view in my earlier comments.

Here’s what I’m saying: to win the audience, 50 percent will acccept anything that sounds like common sense. Another 25 percent will want to actually hear the evidence. The final 25 percent you will never be won over. If you add the 25 percent from an evidence-based point of view, then you’ve got a majority. I think that you can agree with the ‘whole mind’ view.

Research is NOT a dirty word. In fact its our friend, guys.

Prakash Nair:

I hear you, Jeff. Of course research is important and we definitely don’t want to throw the baby out, etc.

On the matter of colors, however, no one has yet asked us to support our color selections with research in actual projects. I guess this sort of falls into that gray area between pure creativity and research-supported professional practice. When clients trust your judgment, they want to hear what you have to say first. Then they can see with their own eyes and by the reaction of their stakeholders if it ‘worked’ or not.

As a creative designer, you know what I’m talking about. That ‘wow’ factor when something really clicks is a very visceral and a “gut” thing. Very different from the other (but not necessarily less important) world of research. Hopefully, the two worlds will come together and often do - but sometimes don’t.

In the world of lighting and color, it looks like the research camp is telling us to do things that, from our own experience, we know does not make sense. Hence, Randy’s piece on the “Myths” of Lighting and Color (now a chapter in our reprinted book). This has been ’syndicated’ with numerous reprints in Edutopia, European Lighting, SchoolsforLife, and so on. In all these forums, Randy has challenged conventional thinking and existing research — hopefully opening up avenues for new research.

If people are uniformly excited or mostly excited, then they are happy. In the arena of subjective things like aesthetics, we can of course have some overarching patterns (as we do with the EFEI (Educational Facilities Effectiveness Instrument) tool) but there is more room for individual creativity and “style” than in other areas where research would be more applicable and where the “measures” would be more rigorous. I was making the point earlier that we should be comfortable with having a professional opinion when it is based on years of our own experience even if it challenges conventional wisdom. And, yes, we may sometimes have to stand by what we know to be true even when there may be research that seems to say otherwise. Lighting and color are definitely in that category.

Hope you see that this is not an “argument” between research and non-research, but rather a recommendation that we not abandon our common sense and our own professional judgment when we look for that balance. This seems to be what you are saying as well, so we are really agreeing and not actually arguing (for those who may have thought differently)

Jeff Lackney:

Certainly we all start with our common sense as a point of departure. Folk psychology is an entire field committed to understanding people’s common sense views of the world. Many are correct, many are wrong and misguided. Many common sense views, such as “the world is flat”, were blown apart by reasoned observation. My argument is that we also take the time to support those common sense views with what is known through rigorous research even if it has holes in it.

To be very specific regarding color research, the issue is not that red is not emotive. Of course it is, as are most colors. You added plenty of anecdotal evidence in your previous statement. The ultimate issue is how the research itself was conducted, the methodology, and the even more fundamental hypotheses formulated that were being tested.

The problem with much of this research (as well as research on windows from the 70’s that Randy mentions) is that the methods were crude and unreliable. This view is accepted now. Most color studies have been conducted in laboratory settings and not the natural settings which people find themselves in. The reality is that red probably DOES raise blood pressure, etc, but in a very narrow, isolated situation. This is probably not the case in a complex real world context where there are 12 other competing colors.

This is what I mean by taking the time to understand what the research can actually tell us and then moving beyond it with better, more relevant questions. It is the famous argument between rigor and relevance – basic vs. applied research. What can be taken from this early research on color is that, in fact, colors are emotive. One interesting finding that is in the research that I use to mitigate against the findings about color is that color is most likely (my hypothesis) mediated by culture. In certain cultures, red MEANS stop, love, anger, etc. Likewise, in certain cultures, purple MEANS royalty. This “colors” all the color research, so to speak. If color is more about culture, spending time to understand those connections would be well worth the effort.

If all one wants to know about research is how it can convince stakeholders, then we can simply use what works and ignore the rest especially if its part of a larger set of solutions and patterns that serve the clients’ needs. On the other hand, if one is interested in improving environments across the board for kids (as well as to convince our clients), then spending time contributing to the database of expert knowledge actually requires some research. Thus, the reason for the ‘research share’ site (School Design Research Studio) I manage, and thus my reason for keeping one foot in the world of educational environment research. That’s my thing, guys, as well as being creative as a designer. Actually, as we all agree, the best hypotheses come from a creative center – witness Einstein who “imagined” what is was like to ride an photon at the speed of light.

Challenging research is fine and can be an important enterprise for the advancement of science. Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reminded us of that.

I’m not against challenging research. In fact, Karl Popper, philosopher of science, argued that NOTHING in reality can be proven; it can only be dis-proven. Explanations are held as the best guess until they can be dis-proven. This is a basic tenant is fundamental to the development of “truth value” in science.

So, Randy’s challenges are great, but it stands to reason that some one might want to pick up and challenge the challenge itself. That’s all I am doing here myself. If the hypothesis that “any color is good” sounds like a robust proposition, that it deserves to be tested and “confirmed”. Both within our own conversations and on a larger research-based level.

Prakash Nair:

OK, excellent points on both accounts. I agree with everything you said.

This discussion now seems to be coming to closure, so let me leave all of us with a few final points.

Certainly, let us contribute to the advancement of our knowledge and that of others by being more rigorous in our approach and always challenging ourselves. As for testing and confirming Randy’s assertion that all colors are good, much anecdotal info is already available to us that shows this to be true.

Personally, I’m convinced. I have no interest, expertise or desire to prove or disprove this particular hypothesis. But since this is ‘out there’ in the online and print world, anyone else who seeks to challenge it and has the resources, time and interest to do so, probably will. We’re providing a starting-point, a spark for others.

In that way, at least we have contributed to the advancement of the science and lived up to your challenge, Jeff.

*****

To contribute your own thoughts about this debate, please feel free to send an email to info@designshare.com. We’d love to hear from you both in anecdote and research alike!