CCIS was designed with
three main functions in mind: Teaching, research, and various study spaces.
Sporting 8 of the most behemoth lecture halls on campus all seating well over
200 students, with the PCL lounge (1-440 & 1-430) boasting seating of over
400 for huge introductory classes as well as a space for faculties to hold
conferences (i.e.: Brian Harder Honours Psychology Conference). These lecture
halls are outfitted with everything a professor might need to teach a class,
computers (with tablet screens), two projectors, cameras, ect. All wheelchair
accessible, which is refreshing when compared with Biological Sciences or any
of the older arts buildings. However, the primary issue with this building
comes up when people are leaving these lecture theaters.
The only stringently
awful piece of design in this building is where CCIS connects to the chemistry
building (Highlighted in yellow). Designers were obviously not prepared for the
huge influx of people that would flood this area during class transitions,
hundreds of people flood into a 90°
corridor with 4 doors, essentially turning people into lemmings. The next design critique is the fact that heading south from
lecture theaters 1-440 and 1-430 they decided to open the stairwell heading to
L1 level way more than they had to. Presumably they did this for natural
lighting, however during class transition you have hundreds of people flood a
wheelchair ramp, virtually no-one uses the stairwell. One of Andrew Scott’s
principles of sustainability is that the building must fit within the current
environment, so it must take into account the current architecture
(Chem building to the south, BioSci to the north west). Although the buildings
connect, they are not optimized for the sudden massive influx of students that
pour through the area at regular intervals, they should have slightly modified
the Chem building and made the hallway double its current width at least, this
would save students from going outside to beat the crowd in the winter. The
stairwell that was made to let in natural light, should have been much smaller,
so that the people are more inclined to take the stairs.
The next use I’d like to focus on is the
efficacy of CCIS as a study space. It boasts several locations for students to
study, including a large number of couches and tables across the main entrance
(first photo, below), and tables/chairs on just about every floor (second and third
photo, these photos are fairly dated too, there are currently many more study
spaces with more ergonomic tables and chairs). A paper I’d found from a
organizational psychology outfit in the Netherlands looked at noise interference in
Open Plan Study Environments (OPSEs; Braat-Eggen et al., 2017). In this article
they rally for the importance of OPSEs in areas with growing student
populations, as the university gets larger it will invariably need to
accommodate students who need a place to study while on campus. The authors of
this article conducted a field study in various universities across Europe,
looking at noise disturbances in OPSEs, particularly, the acoustics of the
room, the noise disturbance type, and the type of task the student is trying to
accomplish while in the OPSE. Humans have a limited amount of cognitive resources
to direct their attention, as such noise plays a huge role in distraction.
There is heavy cross-modal interference that occurs, the analogy I like to use
is if you have ever been in a car with someone and they turned down the radio
while looking for a specific address, you have seen someone trying to reduce
the cognitive strain on their working memory. By turning down the music, they
are freeing cognitive resources to focus their attention on parsing the
environment for the address.
The same principle can be applied to someone
studying in CCIS, if during a class transition, someone is trying to study they
are no doubt distracted by the overwhelming number of people, the accompanying
din of voices, and loud footsteps. The journal article claims that one third of
students survey are disturbed by noise, although this is hard to confirm due to
the confounds of a field study. Additionally they showed that students are
mostly disturbed by speech and walking sounds in OPSEs. They do however point
out that concrete is a particularly good option for floors to reduce
distraction, however the examples they provide are often carpeted concrete (not
as feasible for Canada), the concrete does not allow for as much reverberation
in the floor.
In the study they looked at the worst university space for noise distraction and loudness (OPSE-C), they ended up finding that it its floors were raised and hollow allowing for reverberation, creating more ambient noise. Despite having a sound absorbing suspended ceiling.
This
graph shows ambient sound pressure levels over a 30 minute period. As you can see
the OPSE with the weird floors has the most ambient noise. So, extrapolating,
CCIS does very well in this regard, however there have not been attempts to
minimize ambient echoes as the entire space is open format. A possible solution
to this could be sound absorbing materials around the study spaces, as they
tend to be in corners.
In conclusion, anything that minimizes disruption to the users
in the environment increases the sustainability of human resources by making
them more efficient. Joshua Goldstein highlights economic’s unique take on
waste as a matter of efficiency, by decreasing the wasted potential of study
space we increase the likelihood of people actually using the space. Ezio
Manzini highlights the importance of diffuse designers being the perpetuators
of sustainable design, for something to be used continuously, it must first be
useful to the people it was designed for. In this vein the issues of noise and
traffic become forefronted in the functionality of the space.
References
Andrew Scott, "Design
Principles for Sustainable Urban Housing in China," in Sustainable Urban Housing in China:
Principles and Case Studies for Low-energy Design, eds. Leon R.
Glicksman and Juintow Lin (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2006), pp. 24-43. (UA Library eBook)
Joshua Goldstein, “Waste,” Oxford Handbook of
The History Of Consumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.
326-347.
Ezio Manzini, Design, When Everybody Designs:
An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation, tr. Rachel Coad
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015), Introduction, pp 1-6. (UA Library internet
access)
P. Ella
Braat-Eggen, Anne van Heijst, Maarten Hornikx & Armin Kohlrausch (2017)
Noise disturbance in open-plan study environments: a field study on noise
sources, student tasks and room acoustic parameters, Ergonomics, 60:9,
1297-1314, DOI: 10.1080/00140139.2017.1306631
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