Designing Inclusive Educational Spaces for Children with Autism

Background: Despite the overwhelming occurrence of autism, it is by and large overlooked by the architects and designers as a condition that influences building design and excluded from building codes and design guidelines. As a result, the built environment has failed to consider the needs for users with autism. In educational spaces, the existing accessibility standards take care of physical access but children with cognitive limitations often remain unrepresented. Today with escalating incidence of autism and advent of inclusive education, it has become vital to explore the scope of environmental design for autism.
Objectives: To recognize the environmental issues effecting performance of children with autism in educational spaces, measure the environment’s impact on learning and develop guidelines for architects and designer to design autism friendly educational places. The study also explores the effect of the environment on able-bodied children for universal access and application.
Methods: There are several stages to this research and design project. To begin with ‘eighteen environmental design issues’ are identified based on the behavior of children and interventions adopted by the teachers and therapists. Then a three prong evaluating tool is developed to validate these issues in existing educational settings. The issues are tested in different type of educational settings that range from inclusive to specialized institutions for low functioning children with autism. The data is collected from seventeen educational settings; two preschool, five elementary, five middle and five high schools. The identified design issues are concurrently rated by twenty autism experts and thirteen regular education experts. Finally, the high performance and high rated design issues provided the foundation to develop design guidelines for autism friendly educational settings.

Results: The data on physical environment shows strong correlation between educational performance and the needs of children with autism. The environmental design issues are ranked high by educational experts who work with autistic children as well as able-bodied children. This confirms that the design issues are not only favorable for autistic kids but are also beneficial for all school children. Universal consequence of the design issues to the educational environments is furthermore defined by the mean values that establish equilibrium between environment and the demand of all users with and without autism.

Conclusions: The deficits and differences in perception of senses put people with Autism in an unnerving environment surrounded by uncertainty and unpredictability. Although designing physical environment for them requires a good understanding of individual needs, some common environmental design principles can be adopted to improve their responses to teaching and therapies.