Gerald Ajam

Learning spaces

A classroom is not a container for learning. It is part of the learning system.

Status Position

Published August 2026Revised September 2026

All work

Why it matters

Distance affects conversation. Visibility affects attention. Furniture affects grouping. Acoustics affect participation. Display surfaces affect what can remain collectively visible. Technology changes who can speak, show, record, retrieve, and connect.

A room is never neutral. Before anyone has said a word, the layout has already decided who can see whom, who can be seen, how easily a group can form, and how expensive it is to change your mind about any of that.

The most common way to get this wrong is to treat space as a container that learning happens inside. On that view the room is inert, and the only interesting questions are about capacity and cost. It is a tidy view and it is wrong. Sightlines determine who is visible to a teacher and therefore who gets attended to. Seating determines how much friction stands between a student and a conversation with someone who disagrees with them. Storage determines whether materials are reachable or whether asking for them costs a small public act of courage.

None of this requires anyone to have intended it. That is precisely the point. Structure teaches whether or not it was designed to, so the choice is not between a designed room and a neutral one — it is between a room designed on purpose and a room designed by accident, budget, and habit.

What I have come to believe

Furniture is the least interesting variable, and it absorbs most of the attention. A room full of movable tables that is never reconfigured is a conventional room with a higher price tag. What actually changes behaviour is the pairing of a spatial affordance with a routine that uses it — a layout that makes group formation cheap, plus an established practice of forming groups without being asked. Take away the routine and the affordance is decorative.

The second thing I believe is that participation structure does more work than any physical property. Who is expected to talk, when, to whom, and with what standing — those rules are largely carried by convention rather than architecture, and they can be changed far more cheaply than a building can. If a project has limited resources, I would spend them on routines before I spent them on walls.

The third is that the evidence base here is thinner and more contested than the confidence of the marketing suggests. There is decent work connecting basic environmental factors — light, air quality, temperature, acoustics, and visual complexity — to attainment. There is much less establishing that any particular fashionable configuration outperforms a well-run conventional one. I take the environmental findings seriously and treat the configuration claims as hypotheses.

How I approach it

I start from the activity, not the plan. What are learners supposed to be doing — noticing, arguing, building, rehearsing, presenting? Each of those wants something different from a room, and some of them want incompatible things. Naming the tension early is more useful than designing a space that claims to support everything and therefore supports nothing in particular.

Then I look for the cheapest intervention that changes the activity. Often it is a routine, a rule about who moves, or the removal of something rather than the addition of anything.

In short

The position in four claims

The argument above, cut down to what travels.

  • The room is part of the learning system

    Sightlines, distance, acoustics and display surfaces decide who gets attended to and what stays visible. They do it whether or not anyone designed them to.

  • An affordance needs a routine

    Movable tables that never move make a conventional room with a higher price tag. A layout changes behaviour only when a practice uses it.

  • Participation structure outranks furniture

    Who talks, when, to whom and with what standing is carried by convention. Conventions are far cheaper to change than walls.

  • Environment first, configuration second

    Light, air, temperature and acoustics have evidence behind them. Fashionable layouts mostly have enthusiasm behind them, so I treat them as hypotheses.

In practice

The questions I ask

Before designing anything in this domain, and again when something is not working.

  1. What are learners supposed to be doing here: noticing, arguing, building, rehearsing or presenting?
  2. Who can see whom, and who can the teacher see without moving?
  3. How much does it cost, in time and in nerve, to form a group or change one?
  4. What has to stay visible to the whole room, and where will it live?
  5. Which routine will use this arrangement, and who will teach it?
  6. What could we take away instead of adding?

Designing a learning space therefore means designing patterns of activity rather than selecting furniture.

Unsettled

What I would still argue about

The honest list. These are open in my own head, not rhetorical.

  • How much of what gets attributed to space is actually attributable to the novelty of a refurbishment, and to the enthusiasm of the staff who volunteered for it.
  • Whether flexibility is a genuine good or mostly a way of deferring a decision nobody wanted to make.
  • Whether the environmental findings — light, air, acoustics — should simply outrank everything else in a fixed budget, and we should stop pretending the rest is where the leverage is.
Singapore