The built environment and child care work (3)

Hy Resnick

This column continues its focus on the impact of the built environment on the behavior and life of participants in the human service/child care world. (See Part 1 and Part 2). This month I will concentrate on another set of dimensions of the built environment and the potential impact of those dimensions on behavior. These dimensions are : Security , navigational ease, clutter and the outside.

Security
Dogs make sure to lie down with their back to a wall facing a door in a room when preparing for sleep and so do humans. An example – I conducted an exercise in a class of twenty six graduate students asking them to find a “comfortable and safe space to sit and lay down” in a large uncluttered classroom. Twenty of them located themselves around the room with their backs to the wall facing the door. Five placed themselves near a large window. One student decided to sit herself in the middle of the classroom at the end of the exercise.

The above two examples suggest that a space has to provide opportunities for safety/security worries when we consider where humans stay or sleep.

Navigational ease
This dimension has to do with the directions in a facility which use signs to guide a new visitor to a desired room and the extent to which these directions facilitate visitors and residents moving around a facility and getting to their destination in that facility easily. Some questions that come to mind regarding how signs are used to expedite navigation in a building are:

Are signs written in a language that are used by clients? If most clients coming to the facility are Mexican Americans are some of the signs written in Spanish as well as English ? Ditto if the clients are Vietnamese or Russian of course.
Are they understandable? For example, signs directing visitors to the facility's bathrooms can be better understood by the now familiar and universal figures wearing pants or skirts. Directions also can be decorative as well as functional. For example a large children's hospital in the northwest in an effort to make directions kid-friendly uses wall murals to direct a visitor to follow the “red trains to the pharmacy”. They also posted a large colorful clown with his finger pointing towards the elevators leading to the parking lot.
Are the letters in the signs small and difficult to read? Are they well lit for evening visitors? Are they placed in spots that are readily visible? Of course some of these suggestions are more appropriate for larger more bureaucratic facilities than smaller ones but thoughtfully designed and located signs can help a visitor feel comfortable about “visiting” any sized facility and making good use of its services. If the built environment of a facility doesn’t help visitors feel comfortable they can feel even more anxious about coming for help or treatment.
Having said this, it is true that a knowledgeable and sensitive receptionist can compensate for poor signage and often does by talking to visitors in their own language. Make sure there is a big sign in front of her office saying “Spanish and English is spoken here”.

Clutter
When I interviewed staff of a child care agency about the extent to which problems in their facility inhibited their morale or the work effectiveness more than a few of them replied that clutter around their offices was a big irritant and worked against their desire and need for an organized and efficient looking office in which to work. They also thought that clutter in the kid clients bed rooms, lounge and dining areas was equally problematic for them. Clutter also not only made it difficult to get to a colleague in an office on the other side of the building or to the copy machine room or the lunch room but it also made them feel “unprofessional” or sloppy. More important perhaps they often didn’t know who put the “clutter” in those places and who was responsible for getting rid of it!

The outside environment
This dimension deals with the outside environment in which a social agency is located and the extent to which it is a factor affecting service. Regarding this dimension, which real estate agents always refer to as “location, location, location”, a number of questions should be raised and addressed by social agency decision makers. For example:

1. Is this environment safe? Can clients, visitors and staff feel free to come and go (sometimes at night) without feeling or being threatened.

2. Is the facility near public transportation? Some clients or visitors may not have cars and have to use public transportation to travel to the agency. If so, is the agency on or near a bus route and, if yes, is the bus stop near the agency or does it require a block or two walk to get there (sometimes difficult for a mom to do if they have one or two children to carry or hand hold)?

3. Is the bus stop situated so that moms are required to walk across a possibly busy street – sometimes not protected by a traffic light. The agency needs to work with the city department of transportation to deal with this problem or face possible injuries to clients, visitors and even staff!

4. One agency with whom I worked, perhaps reflective of some aesthetic interest, had designed and had constructed a set of doors which were beautiful, ornate, large and very heavy. I observed moms with one or two children actually struggling to open the doors while holding on to their little ones at the same time. It seems even the doors of a professional agency should be designed not only with aesthetic criteria in mind but also in terms of client’s needs, safety concerns and life styles.

I’d like to end by suggesting an exercise that might provide agency leadership with good ideas as to how to improve the physical aspects of their facility:

Assign to some clients, staff and managers the task of making recommendations to improve the physical facility of their agency with respect to the waiting room, bathrooms, dining areas, bedrooms, offices, classrooms and the like.. Then note the similarities (and differences) of their recommendations to develop an action plan to improve how your agency physical facility might be a better fit for your agencies goals.