The NY Times Sunday Review piece from 13 January 2013 entitled ‘Designing for calm’ touches on a number of SRV and PASSING relevant points, and might be seen as a nice counterpoint to an earlier blog post linked to an article entitled ‘Architecture of insanity.’
The writer points out links between the nature of many human service settings and the occurrences of violence in those settings. The writer claims, correctly from my perspective, that architecture and setting can be consciously designed to be calming and thus reduce the prevalence of violence in certain service settings. How? By paying attention to such fairly simple things as: opportunities for privacy, options for private bedrooms and bathrooms, architectural designs that minimize noise and crowding, movable seating, more natural light, and so on. (A non-programmatic point: Even when such features cost more, the writer states that these costs are more than offset by reducing the financial costs associated with violence and aggression in service settings.) Some of the relevant ratings from the PASSING tool (2007) include: R213 physical comfort, R214 challenge and safety features, R215 individualizing features.
The writer does not raise larger questions around what is normative, or in SRV language, the culturally valued analog. This SRV tool is also relevant to discussions of setting and environment. For example, someone’s home, favorite coffee shop, library, public park, art museum, and so on, are more culturally valued and are likely much calmer and calming than many or at least most human service settings, no matter how nice.
In addition, such culturally normative and valued settings would provide many more valued role communicators and options for socially valued roles. Even with nicer architectural features, human service settings often communicate devalued role expectations of, for example, human service client, the menace role, child role, etc.; perhaps through service features and practices such as the language used by staff, program policies, staff-service recipient ratios, segregation and congregation, etc. Some devalued roles are also likely to contribute to increased violence and aggression, not only from service recipients but from staff as well. Nonetheless, the writer’s points about the physical settings of human service programs are quite instructive and consistent with SRV and PASSING.
Marc Tumeinski
The designing calm model may also be highly applicable to schools and public spaces. In some ways well thought-out and coherent architecture may be an anecdote for the adoration of behaviorism.