The built environment:
Impact on kids and staff

The relatively new field of ergonomics ( I and others used to call it psycho/architechture ) has not made much of an impact on our literature. But it's major ideas (e.g. the design of physical spaces to influence desired behavior) have been used extensively for many years by human service providers.

For example, when child care practitioners have thought of improving the physical interiors of their buildings (offices, waiting rooms, hallways, etc.) they have:

• placed attractive prints of Native-American, African-American or Mexican-American life on the walls of their agencies, in their offices and hallways if most or even if some of their clients came from these cultures

• used fresh flowers, rugs on their floors and incandescent lights (instead of florescent lights)  to soften the ambience of their offices and make them more welcoming

• placed comfortable chairs instead of old benches in their waiting rooms and used current, relevant magazines there instead of old, tattered ones 

• made available age-appropriate playrooms for parents and children who are waiting — sometimes for long periods of time — to see their caseworkers ( toddlers need a different kind of play space and toys than older more active kids )

• provided full-length mirrors in the rooms of a girls' group home with the hypothesis that these mirrors somehow would reduce conflict between the girls ( and it did! )

• arranged chairs in a patients' lounge located in a mental hospital for schizophrenic adults and children so that the chairs faced each other in small groupings.** The hypothesis in this study was that this configuration would facilitate interaction amongst the patients who did not talk to each other easily. And it did!

• introduced some of the following interventions when hallways, elevators and stairways (transitional spaces) have become vandalized by youthful gangs: examples are naming a stairway for a famous person known to and respected by the residents with the hope that would lead to less anti-social behavior there; assigning a hallway to families on a rotating basis on that landing to oversee that unit (keeping it clean, providing a presence there and making sure only appropriate persons are allowed there) with the hypothesis that 'ownership ' approach might be a way of reducing vandalism in the hallways;  encouraging the residents of a building to form a painting party to decide on a color to paint the hallway, purchase the paint and then on a given day to paint the hallway the desired color, the thought being that families which have put time, energy and money to 'beautify' their hallways would have a vested interest in keeping it clean and free from damage, dirt and vandals.

These small changes inside the built environments of child care agencies do indeed help improve the attractiveness and work of these agencies. But more recently child care administrators and practitioners also recognized the importance of the 'big picture' of improving the very structure and nature of their agencies, and therefore they have planned and created smaller, more intimate family style housing units (which we are now calling group homes) for troubled children in care to replace the large, bureaucratically managed housing for these children (which we called residential treatment institutions!)  These smaller units are hypothesised to meet the needs of our troubled children in care more effectively than the larger more institutionalized units. Although the evidence for this approach is still not in, most child care policy-makers and practitioners believe this is the right way to go. We'll have to wait and see.

These examples illustrate the possible benefits of modifying child care physical facilities to enhance the care of dependent or distressed children living in a group home, but more needs to and can be done. In next month's column I will describe an exercise to modify some aspect of a group home's built environment in a participative way, without employing expensive designers or architects — assuming of course the child care staff and administration (and kids?) want to make these changes!