The following is excerpted from Anita Rui Olds book Child Care Design Guide.

Until her death in 1999, Ms. Olds was highly regarded as one of the leading experts on the design of childcare facilities. She held a doctorate in Human Development and Social Psychology from Harvard University and was the founder and director of The Child Care Institute, an annual training program for designers and child-care professionals, co-sponsored by Tufts University and The Harvard Graduate School of Design. Much of the philosophy around the design of The Cedarhouse School comes directly from Ms. Olds teachings in this book.

Childrens Four Basic Environmental Needs

In addition to the need for consistent and personalized care, children have four basic environmental needs, (which adults share), for movement, comfort, competence, and control. Keeping these four needs foremost in mind during every aspect of center design, and especially in developing the interiors, will go a long way towards assuring an optimal outcome.

An Environment That Encourages Movement

A key design requirement is to allow children the greatest possible variety of large muscle movement both indoors and out. The entire ambience should offer an invitation to move within safe and tolerable limits. Motion permits children to locate themselves freely in space, create their own boundaries, access diverse territories, and explore their abilities. Moreover, movement is considered to be the bedrock of all intellectual development. Adults can easily become aggravated by many little bodies each moving to a separate drummer. In an attempt to constrain movement indoors, caregivers sometimes eliminate gross motor equipment, restrict the territory available for action, or require children to sit in chairs, cribs, or playpens. If restricted too much, children become frustrated and their attempts to learn are diverted into inappropriate expressionthey fidget in their seats or incessantly try to gain access to prohibited materials. When these behaviors become repetitive or lead children consistently to disobey established rules, teachers may begin to locate the causes for the misbehavior within the child, and to suspect deficiencies such as poor motivation, attention deficits, and hyperactivity. But often it is merely limited opportunities for movement that create many so-called behavioral and learning difficulties. Group rooms designed with appropriate indoor supports for large muscle activity (such as climbers, lofts, movement areas, and equipment with movable parts) and opportunities to run, climb, swing, slide, and crawl outdoors, can resolve the tension between childrens needs to move and caregivers needs to organize the movement.

An Environment That Supports Comfort

When children feel comfortable in their physical surroundings, the will venture to explore materials or events around them. Consider places which make you feel comfortable. Most likely, the settings involve moderate and varied levels of stimulation for the senses.

Our sense organs are designed to detect changes in stimulation rather than to monitor a steady state or constant input. They therefore require movement and change, even though the built environment tends to be static and unchangeable. While dramatic fluctuations in stimulation level can be frightening and disorienting, patterns of movement that are moderately diverse help to maintain optimal levels of responsiveness and make us feel comfortable. behavior is optimum at moderate levels of stimulationthe comfort zonerather than when there is too much or too little stimulation. The relationship between performance and stimulation is actually non-linear: Although performance tends to increase with increasing stimulation, at some point, too much stimulation leads to a decrease in performance. In fact, because behavior at the two ends of the spectrum looks identical, it is often difficult for a teacher to know whether a childs disinterest is due to boredom or overarousal. Comfortable settings provide neither too much sameness or too much contrast, but what Fiske and Maddi call difference-within-sameness. Nature best exemplifies this differencewithin-sameness concept providing us with some of our most comforting experienceswafting breezes, babbling brooks, sunlight dancing on leaves. The sense of calm we experience in a beautiful natural setting is perhaps due to natures capacity to establish rhythmic patters of change akin to our own physiological rhythms. Children also appreciate, and need to have, extensive experiences outdoors. By contrast, the over- or underarousing levels of sensory stimulation present in many child care centerslong, echoing corridors; cold tile floors; groups of identical tables and chairs; glaring fluorescent lights; artwork hung indiscriminately; bright, chaotic colors and patterns everywhereexacerbate feelings of disease. The many ways in which design can provide difference-within-sameness are discussed throughout this book. Among the most important are variation in architectural elements such as scale, floor height, ceiling height, and lighting, variety in the texture of finish materials, and the presence of soft elements such as carpets, couches, and pillows. Each group room also presents opportunities to create separate places for engaging in different activities: areas that are warm and cozy; hard and sterile; dark or light; noisy or quiet. Varied spaces prevent boredom and discomfort by enabling children to seek out stimulation that suits their moods and levels of arousal at different times of the day. Variety is the spice of life is a good adage to keep in mind when designing for comfort.

An Environment That Fosters Competence

Children need to feel successful in negotiating the world around them. Yet, their immaturity and small size constantly force them to confront intimidating and frustrating experiences: light switches too high to reach, faucets to tight to turn, clay too hard to pound. A supportive environment helps children fulfill their own needs, execute tasks easily, manage their own tools and materials, and control their own movements from place to place. Listed below are three design factors that enhance childrens ability to work competently: 1. A variety of things to do. To assure that children will find things at which they can succeed and through which they can reveal themselves. 2. A variety of places in which to do them. To reduce the overall scale of the room and group, and help children perceive the possibilities and limits of each activity. 3. Well-organized and accessible things and places. To invite child use, help focus attention, clarify ideas, and support possibilities for execution.

An Environment That Encourages a Sense of Control

It is also important that children have the ability to exercise control over their immediate personal environment by being able to have some privacy, to make predictions, and to appropriately orient their bodies in space.

Privacy. Because adults must have full view and ready access to children in child care settings, a childs opportunity for privacy is often neglected. However, like adults, children suffer when possibilities for retreat are not available. Window seats, platforms, cubbyholes, fiberboard barrels with cutouts, and small enclosures provide real ideal spots to get away from it all. Certain design tactics can also assist in maintaining a balance between access to the child and the childs need for privacy. Predictability. Institutional settings are inherently unpredictable: one is never sure what will happen next, who will arrive, and for what purpose. Unpredictability increases childrens lack of ease and control. A well-designed center is decipherable by a child. For example, upon entering a room, the first thing a child wants to know is: How did I get in here? How do I get out? What other spaces is this space connect to? Boxlike rooms with few connections, or womblike enclosures that create too much environmental protection, are as distracting and unsettling as too much physical stimulation or visual input; children feel cut off from things around them, not knowing what might occur to interfere with their activity. Doors and windows that are informative and distinctive give reassuring answers to these questions. Spaces designed to support predictability often involve a vista or an elevated position so that occupants can scan all areas of the room and anticipate future events. This is one reason why lofts and changes in level can be valuable. A building whose scale is small, and designed as a cluster of spaces is more interpretable than one consisting of many rooms off long corridors. Predictability also can be increased by using interior windows or walls of glass, by keeping boundaries low and partially transparent, by well-modulated lighting and sound, and bold graphics. Orientation. Solidity at ones back is another essential of environmental control. Adults instinctively place their own chairs and desks against a wall or in a protected corner, but they often leave children vulnerable in the more exposed areas such as on the floor in the middle of the room. For children to experience a sense of safety and control, they need to sit so their backs are against the walls in the rooms most protected places.

Balancing the Four Needs

The design of any child care setting needs both to provide for and to balance these needs for movements, comfort, competence, and control. Whenvever one factor is limited, the others have to be increased. For example, if children are required to sit stillas in a group meeting they will need to be provided interesting things to attend to, a comfortable place to sit, and a vista or view that gives them considerable control over the room. If a child is disabled and

experiences many limitations at once, such as ineptitude, decreased movement, and decreased control, then the comfort dimension must be given more attention than normal.