Designing A Classroom For Humans

One of my earliest lessons in classroom design came when I was teaching environmental philosophy at Penn State back in the early 2000s. The classroom assigned to me had neat rows of chairs bolted to the floor. The seats and desktops were wooden, and the rest of the chair was metal.

One day I noticed that there was competition for one of the chairs in the front row. It turns out that was the only chair in the classroom designed for left-handed writers. All the chairs had desktops that wrapped around from the right side, so that right-handed writers could rest their writing…