Designing for Autism: Innovative Spaces with Steve Orfield

This transcript was made, in part, by an automated service. In some areas there may be errors. 

AJ: [00:00:00] Welcome to Once Upon a project where we uncover the wildest most ambitious stories in design. I'm your host, AJ Perone, design futurist for Sand Out Design Group, bringing you insights from your favorite design brands, interior Design Magazine, metropolis Design, milk, and Think Lab. Today's episode is especially close to my heart.

Many of you know that I have an adult son with autism who is severely disabled. His diagnosis back in 1998 sparked what's become a lifelong mission for me, designing spaces that support those with neurological differences. That journey began over two decades ago, and it still continues today. I'm joined by someone who shares that same passion, Steve Orfield.

I first met Steve as a design student at the University of Minnesota during a tour [00:01:00] of his lab, and I still remember being in awe. Of how science could translate into better design. Steve has spent his career using research to make environments more inclusive, and in this episode we'll talk about a project we collaborated on for Fraser.

A leading autism treatment provider based in Minnesota. Oh, and did I mention where we recorded this conversation? You are about to hear the first ever podcast recorded in the quietest place on earth. Let's go there now.

Hi friends. We are here today at Orfield Labs and there's a Guinness Book World Record Award given to you, right, Steve? Three

Steve: of them.

AJ: Three of them for being the quietest spot on earth.

Steve: Right, right. When, when we applied to Guinness, when we put this this [00:02:00] up, we measured it, and unlike most labs, we are equipped to do research because we built our labs for research, not for standardized testing.

And so we had to. A $20,000 microphone that measured down to minus two and a half decibels. And we measured this and we, and it floored the mic. So we knew it was at least minus two and a half decibels. So then we studied a method where if you get two of these $20,000 mics and we happen to have two of them, and you put 'em.

Face to face and within a half a wavelength at each other, you can measure down to minus 25 or 26 decibels. So the, the second measurement we did in 2012 was minus 13 decibels. So Guinness opened up the competition again. We measured again and we figured out. We developed a new way to measure where we could get down to minus 29 decibels, and the last measurement we we got was 24.9.[00:03:00]

AJ: Wow.

Steve: And so they re awarded, they opened up the prize and gave it back to us.

AJ: The chamber that we're in right now, if I can describe it, and you can fill in what I get wrong, but we're in a suspended floor. What's holding this floor up?

Steve: Airplane cables. There's two kinds of antiotic chambers. There's what's called a full antiotic chamber, which has a wire floor.

And has absorption all around and below. And then there's what's called a Hemi antico chamber, which most antiotic chambers are, which have a hard floor covered in carpet, but cement, and then they have the walls and the ceiling absorb it. Okay. Those are relatively inexpensive compared to this one. Right.

Which is very expensive.

AJ: Yeah. 'cause I've seen the, the second type in recording studios and things like that where they're, they're just putting things on the surface. They're not actually creating a whole environment.

Steve: Right. But those aren't chambers, those are foam wedges of acoustic foam wedges. Yeah.

When you go to most real accredited antiotic chambers, they're not full chambers. They're hemis. Okay. So they're accredited as hemis. So [00:04:00]they can test things where a reflecting floor is okay, but they can't test many things where you can't have a floor.

AJ: Yeah. So

Steve: we're the only accredited lab in the country in public use that has a full chamber.

AJ: That's so cool.

Steve: Yeah.

AJ: And, and I just have to say, the floor is bouncing a little bit and so it's, it's a little bit of a bounce floor. Yes. But my ears are doing something weird. This one feels like it's plugged. Yeah. And this one feels like it's open.

Steve: Yeah. And the reason for that is that in an anti coic chamber, all you hear is the source of the sound.

You don't hear any reflections.

AJ: Mm-hmm. Okay. So

Steve: it's 100% absorbent in an anti coic chamber. So in every other place you ever go, there's something called a room effect. So the room reverberation mixes the sound over many reflections, and you hear sound coming from everywhere. And it's loudest from the person, but you hear it coming from it all over.

Hear it. That doesn't happen.

AJ: This is fascinating because it's, I'm on a little bit of a bounty floor. My ears are a little like mm-hmm. Trying to figure out what's going on.

Steve: Right.

AJ: So I'm [00:05:00] feeling a little dizzy and I'm drinking wine. Steve.

Steve: Well, maybe you're not. I just thinking you are. This may be this charming illusion.

AJ: It might be, but it is amazing to go into a place that is so quiet. And how my sensory processing is a little bit different right now. It's just things are,

Steve: it's very different,

AJ: right? Yeah. It's kind of throwing me off.

Steve: Two things are happening. You're in the only space you'll ever be in where no sound is bouncing from anywhere.

Okay. And secondly, your ears are going through what's called adaptation. And adaptation means that the range of your hearing is getting more and more and more sensitive. So over the period of the hour that we'll be in here, your hearing will become dramatically more sensitive than it was when you walked in here.

Hm. Because it used to be thought that, that, that hearing thresholds were, were fixed.

AJ: Yeah.

Steve: But years ago they discovered that, that the thresholds are plastic, like all adaptation thresholds. And so the quieter, the noise is. The better you hear. [00:06:00]

AJ: Interesting. That's like the opposite of what people think, right?

Steve: Right.

AJ: It is. So the reason why we're here today is that Steve and I are both gonna talk about a project that we both worked on. It was for an organization called Frazier. They are the largest autism treatment provider in the state of Minnesota. And I had been working with Frazier for years because my son, who is severely autistic.

Started going there when he was three, and it was not far from here, Steve. It was on Hiawatha and it was in a terrible building next to the highway. We had tons of like bus gases from the parking lot. It was a terrible location. But when he first started going there, you know, Frazier only had maybe a hundred, uh, patients, and now they have 36,000.

Right. So they've grown over the years and. I tried to help as much as possible on many of vocations, but we were never got to start from scratch. We always [00:07:00] had to go into a building where we had to do workarounds. Yep. The lobby wasn't big enough. We couldn't put enough therapy rooms in and. This project that you worked on that was in Woodbury, Minnesota, was the first ground up project.

Steve: Well, and interestingly, it was the first scientifically based project in the world because nobody had ever developed a multisensory standard. And to this day, no one has because there aren't any other multisensory labs.

AJ: So let's talk about the why, Steve, you've been doing. A lot of work in the autism community for, for some time now.

Steve: We've been, we've been in invisible disabilities now for 25 years,

AJ: which is much longer than most people.

Steve: Yeah. And my interest is to immerse myself in something, and I am an odd kind of thinker in that I always need a global framework. I always have to understand. The large picture before I care about the small picture.

So I spent two years studying autism and [00:08:00] interviewing 2024 people that I'd gotten from Craig Evans from Autism Hangout, and, and most of them were famous folks and I interviewed them each for three, two hour interviews. Part of what I was trying to do was to simply explain to him that I was a design research guy and I was working on some things, but part of what I was doing was doing indirect psychological questioning.

AJ: Hmm.

Steve: Okay. And so I would ask them, first of all, what do you like about the facility you work in and what don't you like about it? And of course they'd always come to what they don't like about it. So what I wanted to find out is on the spectrum, do you tend to do the same thing as when you're off the spectrum, meaning report incorrectly?

AJ: Hmm.

Steve: Okay. Meaning you can't reach into your unconscious, you can't report on what you're thinking, but you try to.

AJ: Right.

Steve: Okay. And we know that with neurotypicals, that they're not good witnesses to their own feelings because they can't get to their unconscious.

AJ: Right.

Steve: And the question is, were autistic people the same?[00:09:00]

Okay. And so I, I would give them word pictures of rooms, I'd say, I'm gonna give you two rooms that are typical of rooms in the, in the building type you work in and in the library, in the office, or whatever. And I'm gonna describe what's in each of the rooms, and I'm gonna ask you what you prefer. They totally contradicted what they told me about their preferences, just like the neurotypicals did.

AJ: Mm-hmm.

Steve: And one of the things that bothered me about autism research, talking with the Mind Institute and talking with with Peter Bell, who was very helpful, sending me all over the place. Everybody has a lot of false notions about autism. And I counted 12 different bipolar disagreements in the autism community.

AJ: Only 12. 1212.

Steve: Clear ones.

AJ: Yes.

Steve: And then I read an article in architectural record that was sponsored by the A I A that talked about two architects designing two autism centers and trying to determine whether they should design gentle. Peaceful places or [00:10:00] whether they shouldn't. And they both came to the conclusion and AI agreed that they shouldn't be gentle places because they couldn't then mainstream the kids.

Which is a completely false notion. Yes. You know? 'cause during your developmental period, your behaviors have nothing to do with the period after you've developed.

AJ: No.

Steve: Okay. So if you're autistic, by the time you're in seventh or eighth grade and you've had good education and good therapy, you tend to function rather normally.

Okay, but before that, you don't. So there was this concept in architecture broadly held that you're gonna spoil the ability to mainstream your kids if you treat them sensitively during elementary education.

AJ: And that's absolutely the opposite of what I had to do with my child. Well, and it, the, it's the opposite

Steve: of everything we proposed.

AJ: Yes.

Steve: You know, and, and so it was, it was strange. And secondly. I did an interesting exercise with Peter Bell. I asked him to give me the 10 best autism schools in the country. Mm-hmm. In his judgment. He put me in touch with all of them. I talked with one of the, [00:11:00] one of the lead managers of, of each of the schools, and I interviewed the architect who designed each of the schools.

Okay. And I went through a lot of things to try to analyze myself what they were doing, because I was sure they didn't know what they were doing. Yeah. Okay. And what I found is that most all of these schools were designed for sensory seeking kids.

AJ: Mm-hmm. Yes. 'cause

Steve: architecture likes to do things that are colorful and interesting.

Okay. And so I could see how they were thinking, but they didn't know how they thinking. And what was clear to me is that if you take the three divisions of autism, if you take hypersensitive, non sensitives and sensory seeking, I. Sensory seeking people you can't design buildings for. Mm-hmm. Because you must treat them individually.

Yes. Non sensitives. You don't need to do anything for it. Right. So you, you've got left the hyper sensitives and the hyper sensitives must be your sole target.

AJ: Yes.

Steve: In design of a standard. And nobody had ever even thought of that.

AJ: And there's a lot of people that think they're doing research right now that are.

That are really designing for the [00:12:00] sensory seeking people.

Steve: They all are. They all are. Because the sensory seeking people are much more interesting to them.

AJ: Yes.

Steve: And if you can put a little niche in a building that they can crawl into mm-hmm. Then they think that's wonderful and they think it's cool and they think it's an architectural feature they can show in their pictures.

AJ: Right.

Steve: And, and what they don't like. And here's what I'm dealing with in all the invisible disabilities. I'm designing buildings that are very plain,

AJ: mm-hmm.

Steve: That are very simple. That are, that don't require a lot of thinking to get through that don't have a lot of cognitive load from patterns and, and details.

So whether I'm designing for dementia or I'm designing for autism or mental illness, whatever, I'm always trying to take all the details away,

AJ: right? I'm

Steve: always trying to calm people down, give them a zen-like environment. And architects hate those environments. They, they, and when they toured them. They just don't like them.

AJ: I wanna know from your standpoint, what did you feel were the biggest challenges of putting together a good design for this space?

Steve: Well, first of all, the [00:13:00] architect had been on the project for a year when they hired us and I, I had called Diane. And my who is the head

AJ: of Frazier, head

Steve: of Fraser, and and said, Diane, you don't know me, but I run a design research lab and I've spent two years of my life studying autism and developed the world's first and only scientifically based standards, and they're based in hypersensitivity.

I'd like to have you out to lunch to talk about it, and I'd like to have you think about the idea of using us on your next building. And so she came out and, and over a two hour lunch, she loved everything. We showed her everything. She loved everything. And over the two hour lunch, she decided to stop the project.

What she told me in the meantime is she said, well, you know, she said, my architects are telling me I needed a, I need a branded building. I need a building that you went and drive by. You notice it's a Fraser. And I said, I said, Diane, you need the opposite. You need a building that's so gentle that doesn't frighten the kids.

AJ: Mm-hmm.

Steve: You know, and, and the last thing you want is branding or. Display or color? Anything you want, you want it subtle. [00:14:00] My suggestion is gonna be that we do the standards on the interior because the standards were acoustics, lighting, day lighting, thermal comfort and air quality, and that we do. Some studies on the exterior to get to the point where what the architect is doing is gentle on the kids.

AJ: Mm-hmm.

Steve: Okay. Part of the philosophy is going to be monastery design.

AJ: Mm-hmm.

Steve: Okay? And, and I used that as a metaphor they could understand, and I said, in every way, what we're gonna do here is gonna be monastery design. The only difference is monasteries are dark and this is gonna be light. Right. Okay. But every place you go in this building, if we do it right, it's gonna be the same.

Right. You're never gonna gonna see any change. You're never gonna see any, any great color. You're never gonna see an art collection. You're never gonna see. You're gonna see nature. You're gonna see daylight. You're gonna see lots of natural things and lots of neutral things, and it's gonna be a very zen building.

So. We set numerical standards and the standards are all quantitative, so you can model them all in design software. You can [00:15:00] design them quite easily. And so what we're trying to do now is find a nonprofit who will fund letting us create an exemplar standard where it tells designers what they need to do, but it doesn't tell them why, and it doesn't cause them to do any calculating, because most design folks.

Don't do any calculating anyway. Nope. And most architectural engineers have quit calculating because the vendors are designing all their systems. Right? Right. So, so what we wanna do is we wanna create a set of exemplar standards that can easily be handed to a good designer. I. And then they can just call us with questions.

And if they wanna change the, the finishes we're suggesting, they can change them. But we have to measure them to make sure that they fall in the same ranges.

AJ: And how do you measure a finish? Like explain that to a designer that's never done that.

Steve: Yeah. There's a number of characteristic we measure. One is the, is the light reflectance.

AJ: Mm-hmm.

Steve: And so we, we use. Reflectance measurement systems to measure what percent out of a hundred bounces back when light hits a material. And we generally want very [00:16:00] light materials because what designers don't realize is that the quality of the perception of the daylight has a lot to do with your visual adaptation inside the building.

And the lighter the inside of the building is the more the brightness outside seems pleasant.

AJ: It's that contrast, right? It's the

Steve: contrast, right? It's if you create a contrast and you make the building dark and full colored and then you put windows in it, the windows will always look like glare.

AJ: Yes. And I've witnessed that issue.

Yeah. Imagine having a 4-year-old and you're trying to get them to what we call transition. Yes. They leave one environment, one room to go to another room. Yeah. It could be a doctor's office, it could be a school. Yeah. And we leave a bright room and now we walk into a dark hallway. Because a lot of these kids don't have.

The language skills to understand what's being said to them. They're just going into a scary, dark hallway, and why would I be going down this? Well, right.

Steve: And it's not just dark, it's reverberate,

AJ: right.

Steve: [00:17:00] And everything. And it's got a hard floor instead of a carpeted floor. Right. It sounds

AJ: different. It looks different.

Everything

Steve: outed is that it smells different.

AJ: Yes.

Steve: And so what What we did is we said every room is gonna be identical. And it's not only gonna be. Calculated to be identical. It's gonna be measurably identical. So the acoustics, lighting, the day lighting, thermal comfort, indoor air quality is gonna be the same in the lobby in the gymnasium at Fraser.

It is. And the thing we said is not only is this gonna not activate the kids, I. Yeah. But it's gonna make the psychologist and therapist much happier.

AJ: Yes. 'cause they don't have to fight then they don't have to like be dealing with someone that's having a transition issue going from one place to the next.

Right. And they're, they're dealing with a meltdown. They're dealing with a kid that's literally fighting them. 'cause they don't wanna walk into

Steve: the next space. Right, right. And, and equally importantly. It calms them down. As therapists, psychologists I talked to over there said, of all the clinics we have, this is the one that makes me feel the best by far.

So the point of it was that here we're [00:18:00] designing a building that violates all the architectural roles of surprise and joy and color and everything, and gives you a simple space where the space becomes a background for your activity rather than a foreground for your activity and all of a sudden. The building isn't something that, that's taking your cognitive attention away from what you're doing, and the building isn't forcing you to turn one way and be uncomfortable and another way and be comfortable.

AJ: So let's talk a little bit about what happens in the building. 'cause some people, you've never been to an autism center, you don't really know what's happening there. Frazier serves a lot of different kids. Primarily they have autism, but some of them have sensory issues or other comorbidities as people like to say, right.

Primarily what this center was is a [00:19:00] place for families to go to get diagnosing, right? So when you're diagnosing, typically a very young child when you're testing them, if they can hear another child screaming or. Feel the vibrations of them running right or stampeding, that's going to affect how they do when they're testing.

Absolutely. And so we have the evaluations that are really important. Then we have treatment. And the treatment is a variety of things. Number one, there's classrooms Yeah. That are doing a b, A therapy, which is applied behavior analysis therapy. There are s that are doing. Occupational therapy, which is working on gross motor skills, right?

Fine motor skills. There're speech therapists where they're doing one-on-one, sometimes a group on one. There's music therapy, there's all sorts of different therapies, and these kids are there, some of them are there half day, some of them are there a full day. [00:20:00] Some of them are there for an hour or two for just specific therapy.

So you have a lot of families coming in and out. Usually when it's a family coming in, you might have one child getting treatment, and then you have two other kids that are sitting in the waiting room. Mm-hmm. And trying to figure out what to do. This is a community building? Yep. You have families, caregivers.

When you have a child that's getting diagnosed, it's not usually. One parent coming in, it's both parents and sometimes the grandparents, and sometimes the siblings as well. Of course, of course. So it's a lot of different people. Tell us some of your philosophy, especially around the evaluation area, because if you can't.

Test a child or individual properly and you don't get the correct diagnosis, that can just be a snowball of other issues. I agree. So that was really critical for the design of this building. So tell us what some of the challenges were and how you, how you designed to run that.

Steve: Well, this leads to the fact that when they, when they had our, our, [00:21:00] um, our first design research meeting on autism in 2013, Lucy Jane Miller was one of our speakers.

And Lucy Jane Miller runs the only sensory processing disorder research center in North America, and she's a brilliant occupational therapist, and she studied under Dr. Jane Ayers and I, I talked to her for a little while, but, but we exchanged friendly stories and, and I, I told Lucy the story about how I would be dead if I hadn't studied autism.

I was in my house and my wife and children were at our house in Tucson. I woke up falling down a stairway. I hit, hit my head and I didn't know it, and I went into the doctor the next day and I was all banged up and I had been on Ambien and apparently Ambien caused a sleepwalk and there had been many lawsuits on it.

I went in and my doctor said, you're fine. He didn't do any scanning of me said, and he is a very good doctor. Two months later I was in a used car place buying car supplies, and I put my credit card in the credit card runner and [00:22:00] it seemed a little crooked. And I put my wallet in my back pocket and it seemed a little crooked and I realized I had a proprioception error.

Proprioception is knowing exactly where your body's in space. So for example, you can close your eyes and touch your nose, right? It's because you have a sense of where your body is. But I had about a five degree angular proprioception error. So

AJ: an error on how you thought your body was in space.

Steve: Exactly.

And had I not studied autism, and especially had I not dealt with Lucy, I wouldn't have known that. So I went out to the emergency room and I pulled the people aside and he said, how do I get in here and get this done? And I have about a five degree prop ception area in my right hand. I. And I just wanna make sure I didn't have a stroke.

Right. And, and stroke was the key word to get scanned. Okay. I didn't, I knew I didn't have a stroke. And, and so they scanned me and they said You didn't have a stroke, but you have bleeding on your brain. So when I fell, I have a mechanical heartfelt and I'm at blood thinners and I'm the worst person to have a brain injury.

AJ: Yeah.

Steve: They said you've got bleeding on your brain and the [00:23:00] bleeding is so significant that your brain is off center.

AJ: Oh my goodness.

Steve: The next day I was in for brain surgery and had a craniotomy, and I said to my neurologist a couple days later, I said, what's the percentage of people who had come in and complain about an angular error in the hand?

She says, zero. She said, if you hadn't known it was appropriate, receptionary, you'd be dead right now.

AJ: Wow.

Steve: So I look at at my studies and that's the only reason I'm around.

AJ: That's amazing. Yeah.

Even you have empathy for the individuals that are trying to. Really just survive in space and survive in the built environment and, you know, are dealing with a lot of these challenges. So what did you want to happen for this project? If you [00:24:00] thinking about the families, the, the little kids that are coming into this space, I, my

Steve: goal was to not activate the kids.

AJ: Mm-hmm.

Steve: Okay. My goal was to give the kids peace. My goal was to prove to the autism community. I was told by everybody, you can't solve this problem because there's too much variability on the spectrum. And I finally got into a discussion with the head of the mine institution

AJ: because everyone says this, don't they?

They say everybody, if you've seen one person with autism, you've seen one person with autism. They're all so different. Yeah.

Steve: And they also say you can't research, you can't do research on autistic subjects are too complicated. Right. So, so anyway, so I talked to my friend, the head of the Mind Institute and he said, you know, there's too much variability for you to set a standard.

I. And I said, you know, I'm beginning to think that you don't fully believe in science. And he said, he said what? He said, I, I'm beginning to believe you don't believe in science. And he said, what do you mean? I said, you keep complaining about the variability on the spectrum. How much variability is [00:25:00] there off the spectrum?

Right? And, and he thought for about a minute and a half, and he said, it's the same.

AJ: It is.

Steve: And I said, so from today forward, I want you to stop. Making that statement and accept the fact that we can solve this problem. Right. And he degreed.

AJ: So talk to us about, let's start with the evaluation area, because I think that one was, had some significant changes.

So what do, what do we have to do in the evaluation areas that are different than what you would have maybe in a normal clinic?

Steve: I look at it as a uniform case. Mm-hmm. And what I know is that the journey through this clinic has to be a journey that's extremely peaceful, and every room in the clinic has to be extremely peaceful.

Everything has to be private. So we built walls in that clinic that were better than the walls in a luxury condo. So we built the walls that work,

AJ: meaning that they were more sound absorbent. They stopped

Steve: sound. Mm-hmm. Not absorbent, but, but they stopped the sound. So instead of being an STC 40 wall, like you'd put in a normal [00:26:00] clinic, ours are probably 65 or 70.

The doors all had gaskets. The doors were all solid core with gaskets.

AJ: So they had drop seals. Drop

Steve: seals. So

AJ: when you close the door, the seal would go down. Yeah.

Steve: So, so you didn't ever stand outside of somebody's. Um, consultation and hear anything,

AJ: and

Steve: it was, it was, it was above the standard we did for law offices,

AJ: and you have to understand that most of the time when you walk into a clinic.

You are gonna hear screaming. Yeah. You

Steve: are gonna hear screaming and, and you're also going to hear crosstalk between appointment rooms.

AJ: Mm-hmm.

Steve: And, and you're gonna hear it coming through the HVAC system. You're gonna be hearing if there's, if there's diffuse, uh, air diffusion lights mm-hmm. You're gonna hear it coming through the air diffusion lights.

If there's a common plenum, you're gonna hear it coming through the plenum. If you're jumping ducks across offices instead of running them in the hall, you're gonna hear it all. So we rolled out all that stuff and we designed those rooms to be damn perfectly private. And they were

AJ: So, from an acoustic [00:27:00] standpoint, yeah, it was very high quality of sound for outside, inside.

Yeah. But what, what else? From like a lighting standpoint, a natural light standpoint, pure

Steve: lighting standpoint, we are stuck with the fact that the technology that, that we need to use is typically LED.

AJ: Yeah.

Steve: Okay. So. Every piece of LED equipment we used in that clinic was indirect. There was nothing that aimed down at anybody.

AJ: And why is that important, Steve?

Steve: It's important because LED lights are, are a hundred times brighter than the worst fluorescent light, and we've measured them with $50,000 light meters. And they're so bright that they tend to blind you. Yes. So, so if somebody's autistic and they're being, and they're being stimulated by, by levels of stimulus.

An LED light is gonna be a hundred times worse than a fluorescent light

AJ: because it's so much stronger.

Steve: So much stronger.

AJ: I was at a restaurant once with Steven Shore, who I don't know. I know Steve. Yeah. Yeah. So we were at a restaurant, we were at wa, [00:28:00]France. Here. We're having more wine as we're talking about the restaurant

Steve: hearing Less and less.

AJ: Yes. It's a quiet, nice little. Quaint restaurant. Mm-hmm. But they had these little lamps on the table and the shades was pivoted off. Right. And so Steven was trying to have a conversation with me, but he could see the bulb Of course. And so he was like, AJ. I need to go fix this. I'll be right back. Okay. And he got up and he went to the couple.

Yeah. And he said, I am so sorry, but can I adjust your shade? Because Yeah. The bulb is glaring at my face and I can't think right now. Yeah. And they were like, sure, please fix, fix it. Yeah. I

Steve: even, even though I'm not autistic, I have neighbors who have a street, uh uh, yard light. And I asked them, I said, you know, the part sh that I, we've got a 15 by 20 foot floor to ceiling glass room that we added to our house.

It's just my meditation room and it, it's also home theater. And [00:29:00] so I can see this light and it's not terribly bright, but I don't like it. And I, I talked to the neighbors. I said, can I put a light blocker on your light on my side? It won't affect you in any way. They said, sure.

AJ: So you got a light blocker on there.

Exactly. That's amazing.

Steve: I'm, I'm not a small talker. I love to deep into people's lives and I love to understand what's going on and I love to LearnD.

AJ: That's what I appreciate about you, Steve, is that you are trying to figure out what is going on in that person's mind. Yeah, and I think so many times, especially when you're dealing with kids that aren't young Yes.

And they haven't had treatment or they're going through a diagnosis mm-hmm. No one has been able to give them tools yet. To be able to express themselves and they understand what's happening. Like we, we see this all the time when you start putting them through education, whether it's through a PEC system, where it's pictures, where they understand the schedule.

And then they start to calm down. Right. You know, what we tried to do in that building was [00:30:00] take away the physical barriers that a space can put in front of someone. Of course. That now they can't be successful.

Steve: Exactly. When I was in school, I say I, I had to develop a, a view of aging, studying dementia in my view of aging.

Radically changed. And what I, what I discovered is that when I was in first and second grade, many of the little boys and little girls who were with me were little old men and little old women in first grade. They didn't become, they were, and as they went through life, they continued to be, and many of the kids who were exciting in first and second grade are still exciting.

But I said, aging isn't a function of, of getting older. Aging's a function of not being stimulated.

AJ: Oh, that's a really good philosophy. So let's go back to the project for a second.

Steve: Yeah.

AJ: What are you most proud of on that project?

Steve: I'm proud of, of Diane because without her, nothing would've happened. Right.

Part of what I told her is I said, [00:31:00] you could have the first scientifically designed autistic building in the world. Diane wanted to break out. Part of her goal was wanting to break out and become better known.

AJ: Yes.

Steve: Okay. And I said, you've got a way to do it. My joy is in doing the project. My joy is in seeing what I do work.

AJ: Mm-hmm.

Steve: And I don't care if I'm known for it or not by any given party. I don't care if I've, I got a huge public side or anything. It doesn't matter to me. What I care about is that I can succeed at helping. Mm-hmm. And, and, and my success is internal.

AJ: When was the last time you went to Razer? Woodbury?

Steve: When we did an interview with Star Tri that was, had to be a couple years ago.

Yeah. Three or four years ago.

AJ: I was there not long ago.

Steve: Okay.

AJ: The waiting area is so serene, it's flooded with natural light. You have huge exposure to what's going on outside. Yes. The lighting is, is very consistent. Every,

Steve: everything is gentle.

AJ: Everything is gentle.

Steve: Yeah. And that's the [00:32:00] whole point. The whole, the whole point was to measurably take the intensity of everything.

So we say if you use a color. It has to be an extremely mild tint. Mm-hmm. We don't care if you use pink or red and we, we're not gonna get into color psychology. We want you to do, but

AJ: it's the dosage of color and it's the intensity. It's, it's the dosage

Steve: of stimulus. Yes. Okay. And so what we did is we, we took all the stimuli that would be in the building and we backed it off to a level that was abnormally low.

Okay. Much like when we, when we did our first dementia. W we know that we can't bring, we know, first of all, I've written a couple of academic papers and journals on AC and dementia and on aging, and the distinction that I've drawn with aging and dementia is that they're thought of as two different things.

And, and the, the way that the doctors and gerontologists think about dementia is completely wrong. Mm-hmm. The biggest problem you have when you have dementia [00:33:00] is that you're old. If you're young with dementia, like early onset, 15 year olds who have dementia, you can deal with dementia quite easily because you've got 90% of your sensory world.

It's true, but when you get to be old, you've got 10 or 15% of your sensory world, so you're in sensory deprivation in all of your senses, and then you've got cognitive confusion. And so what. What I was trying to say in these two journal articles I did is, is that here's the problems of aging and here's the separate problems of dementia, but dementia is principally a problem of aging.

AJ: Yeah.

Steve: Nobody thinks of it that way.

AJ: No.

Steve: And nobody thinks that when you have dementia, it's not your mind that's going, your senses have all gone.

AJ: Yes.

Steve: And your you're your fine

AJ: motor. Your gross motor.

Steve: Yeah. You're, you're, you're, you know, you may be losing levels of cognitive clarity, but we can deal a lot with that.

Uh, by downloading the complexity of your environment. Mm-hmm. So when we did this, when we did these places down [00:34:00] in Iowa, what, what you hear and what you see and what you sense is always a, um, a signal to noise ratio issue. It's always an issue of how strong is the signal and how low is the noise, and when you only have marginal hearing and marginal vision and marginal sensory stuff.

You need a, a different level of signal to noise ratio. So what we did is we made everything in the building, in all five senses, half as perceptually, noisy as any building we'd ever designed.

AJ: Hmm.

Steve: So we made it acoustically quieter, visually quieter, thermally quieter, olfactory quieter. And we predicted that people would operate as if they were 10 years younger.

AJ: Hmm. Okay.

Steve: We started getting reports. We didn't, couldn't do any research. We had no money for research, but we started getting reports from supervisors and from architect and from the CEO that people, that the staff were, [00:35:00] were reporting. People who never socialize were starting to socialize. People who never talk, were starting to talk.

People who didn't eat much were starting to eat much better

AJ: because they could focus.

Steve: They, they became 10 years younger centrally.

AJ: Mm-hmm.

Steve: Because of the noise reduction we put into the building, which nobody had ever thought of.

AJ: Yeah.

Steve: And all of a sudden it was like it was 10 years ago for them. So they were functioning twice as well one day than they were the day before.

AJ: So how does that correlate to the space that we did for Fraser?

Steve: It's a similar thing. I mean, with Fraser, we're dealing with, with stimuli. I mean, as you, as you look at dimension, as you look at autism, they have a lot in common. Okay? In, in both cases, all of the initial recommendations everybody's given for facilities are behavioral and control definitions.

Okay? They're all about, we, we, we've gotta keep them escaping. You know? You gotta keep them from, from embarrassing people by misbehaving.

AJ: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Steve: So [00:36:00] everything's about the social presence. Of these people.

AJ: So tell the listeners a little bit about what you do here at Orfield Labs.

Steve: Well, we're the, the only multi-sensory design search lab in the world, and our focus is always on human perception rather than engineering measurement.

Okay. So we do engineering measurement, but only to measure human perception. Okay. And what we teach people who come to all of our different seminars is the only significant measurement you can ever measure is a measurement of people. And that the only thing you can directly depend on is people's responses.

And if you wanna know what to do, you measure people's responses and then you create your quantitative definition.

AJ: So let's talk about this room. Tell us what, how you use the quietest room on earth. And can I just say, we're not using microphones right next to our face. They're, they're kind of at the side of the building or a side of the room?

Yeah.

Steve: What we're using is what's called [00:37:00] head and torso simulator or hats. And the hats is a binaural recording system that we use for sound quality studies.

AJ: So what do you find when people come into this space? Because I, you've brought me in here before. I know you've brought other people. Like what are some some of the surprising things that you hear from people?

Steve: Well, we're doing a survey right now. Emma's doing a survey. She, she said, you know, we should do some kind of a test. So I wrote a semantic differential survey and we, we worked on the survey and so now everybody who comes in here is a tourist. Takes a test before and a test after. And what we found on average is before they come in, they're somewhat frightened of darkness and they're somewhat frightened of quiet.

AJ: Really?

Steve: Yes.

AJ: That's interesting. Yeah. Why would someone be afraid of quiet? Well, because

Steve: they read about Anna Coic Chambers and they find that, you know. They, the, the London Daily Mail did a piece when they interviewed me, where they falsely [00:38:00] quoted me as saying that if, if you stay in for more than 45 minutes, you'll go crazy.

AJ: Well, we've been in here for more than 45 minutes and I don't think I'm crazy, and I don't think you're crazy,

Steve: and, and, and I called the Daily Mail and asked them to correct it.

AJ: That brings us to the end of this very special episode of Once Upon a Project. I have to say it did take me a day or two for my hearing to correct from being in the koic chamber for this recording. But I do hope today's conversation with Steve Orfield gave you new insight into how science and empathy can come together to create spaces that truly support human experience.

Our heartfelt Thank you for Steve and to Fraser for the important work you do and to our incredible production team. Rob Schulte and Rachel Santor, thank you for helping bring stories like this to life. If you love this episode and want to hear more like [00:39:00] it, head to surround podcasts.com, your hub for design stories that matter.

We'll be back soon with more design stories. Until then, keep dreaming big. Keep pushing creative limits and we'll see you on the next once upon a project.