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How Good Intentions Might Translate to Poor Design

Why are many childcare centers poorly designed and inadequate to meet the needs of children and staff? Those in charge of planning and designing such projects always have the very best of intentions, but all too often lack the knowledge and expertise needed. Find out how to avoid such headaches.

Over the years I have visited 33 countries and visited over 300 child care centers in the United States and abroad. I have seen all types of child care environments, some great ones and some that were horrible. I have also seen the gamut of mistakes that can be made when people are planning buildings and have no understanding of how design should be adapted for early childhood education.

Designing a high-quality, developmentally appropriate childcare facility is a highly complex task that requires specialized and unique skills. The design and layout of the physical environment, which includes the building, interior finishes, outdoor spaces, selection of equipment and room arrangement, has a profound impact on children's learning and behavior and on teachers' abilities to efficiently do their jobs. The problem is that people don't know what they don't know. Confucius explains this concept:

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."

Believe it or not, researchers at Cornell University and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, have been working to substantiate the validity of this age-old saying. In a research paper published in the June 2003 issue of the journal, Current Directions in Psychological Science, researchers restate Confucius' wisdom this way: "People tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed. Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them ... People are unaware of their incompetence, innocent of their ignorance."

The research showed that the poorest performers at a task, those subjects with the least knowledge, overestimated their performance or skill the most. In contrast, the best performers, the most knowledgeable, actually slightly underestimated their performance. The research supported the same findings of three other research projects conducted during the past several years.

Here's an example of how this plays out in planning a childcare environment: The skills needed to develop the layout for a center are the exact same skills necessary to recognize whether the layout is correct. So the individual develops a layout that won't work, and doesn't have the ability to recognize that the layout is in error - or that other people's recommendations are superior. Put simply, people incompetent in any area of knowledge are likewise ignorant of their incompetence. Ignorance might be bliss, but when it comes to developing and managing businesses, bliss will most likely turn to financial grief.

This research is reassuring to us, as it explains a phenomenon we have often attributed to "architectural arrogance." We now understand what we thought was arrogance is only the result of the human frailty of not being able to recognize one's own ineptitude in a certain area. No one wants to design a poorly functioning center. But if they do not have the knowledge and skills to understand and research what children really need, they won't realize what they've designed won't work well until the center opens.

Considering this decision-making weakness of the human condition, can design errors be prevented? Probably never entirely. We can hope, though, that in the future more entrepreneurs, directors and owners will turn to industry experts for assistance to save themselves from problems caused by their own lack of expertise.

Our company is only one of many consultants and designer/producers in the child care industry. We are often asked what our fees are, only to hear the response, "It's not in our budget,"' or "I can't afford it." We will conclude this article with a simple response to those statements: You get what you pay for. That may appear self-serving, but it's really directed at trying to prevent design failures. These failures end up hurting children, staff and the community by failing to meet their needs and by not giving children a childcare environment that maximizes their cognitive, emotional and social learning. Those who say they can't afford it are often the ones who can't afford not to work with a consultant -- to save themselves from the blissful ignorance of not recognizing how much they need help.

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