How School Design Helps Students Thrive
- Renae Mantooth, PhD
- Evie Guo, PhD
Adolescent well-being is sliding just as academic stakes are rising. Across the US, school districts feel this pressure through disengagement, absenteeism and fragile pathways to college, especially for prospective first-generation college students.
At HKS, we recognize that the built environment has a direct and measurable impact on student well-being. Research enables our designers to create education spaces that foster learning and create connections, based on the best possible data and insight.
Our premise is straightforward: the built environment is not a backdrop; it is a lever. Our study of an HKS-designed K-12 campus in Dallas demonstrates that the built environment can be a tool for achieving both institutional goals and students’ personal aspirations.
The study involved Uplift Education’s Luna Campus, where a pair of schools offered very little usable outdoor space for students and faculty to retreat from conventional classroom environments. Because school grounds and buildings play an important role in student development, Uplift Education sought a new, unified K-12 campus that would provide a more welcoming, supportive atmosphere.
The HKS team started the project with questions such as: How can design emphasize the academic journey of Uplift scholars with the goal of college achievement? How can design promote outdoor social spaces and the health and wellness of students and staff?
By leaning on strong design moves—such as introducing a quad that borrows from traditional university campus planning, to foster student autonomy—we tested design hypotheses tied to well-being, social connection and college readiness.
The results point to how research-informed design can extend beyond academic delivery, becoming a driver that steadies daily life, strengthens the social fabric and equips students for future success.
Research Coalition
We conducted this study as part of a coalition that comprised the non-profit Center for Advanced Design Research and Education (CADRE), HKS, the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) Foundation and Uplift Education. Our research collaboration centered around our shared goal of transforming Uplift Education’s two dense urban sites into a unified K–12 campus organized around a green quad. Together, we framed the study questions to be decision-relevant, then paired longitudinal student surveys with structured observations in shared spaces.
The Uplift Luna Campus Design in Practice
Design sets the terms of the school day. At Uplift Luna, a central quad makes college-going visible and walkable, with the library and counseling center located at the heart of the campus.
Grade-specific zones balance autonomy and support, and daylight and warm materials help students reset.
Stairs with real landings become forums, and study nooks invite small groups without clogging paths. Shaded walkways turn wait time into social time.
Durable brick and smart energy modeling keep the building performance steady, so students’ attention is focused on what they notice once comfort is reliable—cleanliness, lighting quality and real agency.
Key Findings
#1 Well-being often dips during adolescence, but students in this study didn’t experience this expected decline.
Students reported significant gains in their environmental satisfaction with classrooms and non-classroom spaces. At the same time, life satisfaction, stress and loneliness were statistically stable for the overall sample—a meaningful finding given adolescence is a phase of life when well-being typically declines.
Importantly, we also saw two response profiles: a subset with modest environmental satisfaction change and stable well-being indicators, and a subset with large environmental satisfaction gains paired with significant improvements in well-being.
Why this matters: During a stage of life when declines are expected, students maintained levels of life satisfaction, stress and loneliness. As the study notes, these findings “suggest that the new campus environment may have played a stabilizing role,” helping students avoid drops in well-being during a major life transition.
In other words, improved environmental conditions can help hold the line for students at a critical age.
#2 We have direction on what students will focus on once their basic needs are met.
Once students’ basic needs were met, drivers of well-being shifted beyond physical comfort. For the pre-occupancy buildings, “physical comfort” explained much of the variance in well-being. After the move to the new campus, when comfort was reliable, students became more sensitive to the cleanliness of shared spaces, perceived lighting quality, air quality, safety, aesthetics and—crucially—the ability to adjust their environment.
Why this matters: These findings suggest that as a learning environment becomes more adequate, specific experience-enhancing features of the environment, rather than general comfort, have a greater influence on student well-being. Once basic standards of comfort are adequately met, students attend to lighting quality, cleanliness, safety, air, aesthetics and user adjustability.
This finding suggests that funding should first be allocated toward ensuring core capital assets meet a baseline of adequacy before higher-order design strategies come into play. If students are physically uncomfortable, the quality of aesthetics or adjustability won’t matter.
#3 Students need to be active outside school—as well as at school—to see positive impacts on mental health.
Lower physical activity before school and at lunch aligned with higher stress and loneliness, while brief moments of relaxation before and after school aligned with higher life satisfaction.
Why this matters: The results show a measurable shift toward more dynamic patterns of student activity on the new campus—demonstrating that everyday behaviors (such as movement or brief restoration) relate to stress, loneliness and life satisfaction.
Design influences daily experiences by supporting comfort, movement and peer interaction. In contrast to Uplift Education’s previous schools—where cramped corridors offered no room to gather, relax or play—the new in-between spaces highlight the value of unstructured areas that encourage social connection and restoration.
#4 Students socialized more on the new campus—and that has great implications for a generation hampered by loneliness.
Observed isolation dropped materially on the new campus; students appeared more often in pairs and groups than they did alone, which was not the case in the prior setting. We witnessed students talking and playing more in the new campus environment. Self-reported loneliness stayed flat (an appropriate finding given that student well-being is influenced by factors beyond school), but the tone of daily interaction brightened.
Why this matters: The physical design of the new campus reduced barriers to informal conversation and created conditions that support incidental and sustained social contact, aligning with the intent of embedding social affordances into the built environment.
Design features that encourage everyday social contact may play an important role in shaping conditions that support students’ emotional well-being, even when average loneliness scores are unchanged.
Methodology and Impact
Our coalition model was built to meet the study’s goal: to understand how the physical learning environment affected outcomes tied to well-being and college readiness. We used a pre–post design around the campus move, surveyed the same students and systematically observed behavior in the old schools and the new quad-based setting, which provided internal validity and a shared evidence base.
Our coalition approach kept the findings usable for schools, as we tied specific design moves to student experience—feature by feature.
At HKS, we believe research is only powerful when it is put into practice. These findings continue to inform how we design learning environments that enhance student well-being, connection and readiness. If you are exploring ways to evolve your school or district, we would love to continue the conversation.
