The Architecture of Waiting

If you’ve ever gone to the doctor, the odds are good you’ve sat in a room waiting for someone to call your name. With your team, explore the architecture of waiting. How can a waiting room decrease anxiety (or amplify it)? How would you design waiting rooms differently for different purposes?

A room whose only job is to hold you until someone else is ready. Europe spent three centuries building these, and then five hundred years deciding what they mean.

Key concepts

The Politics of Waiting: Waiting has long been used to show who matters: in a royal court or a city office, who waited, where and for how long told everybody their place. A room that leaves you unexplained and out of sight still sends that message, which is one way a waiting room raises anxiety.

Every work — at a glance

The Psychology of Waiting Rooms — Olivia Turner (article)

A survey of how a waiting room's design governs the anxiety of the person in it — wall color, whether chairs face each other or the wall, whether you can see the door your name will be called from. The research underneath is well established and slightly damning: people badly overestimate a wait that is unoccupied and unexplained, so certainty and occupation, not speed, are what make waiting bearable.

+ 12 more works explained inside

What to know

01
How can a waiting room lower anxiety, or raise it? By deciding how much you are told and how much you have to do. A screen showing your place in the queue, a clear sightline to the door your name comes from, and chairs set at an angle rather than in facing rows all convert an unexplained, idle wait into an explained, occupied one. Bare walls, a hidden door and a row of seats staring at it do the reverse — and the clock has not moved either way.

Across subjects

Houston's airport kept getting complaints about the wait at baggage claim. It hired more handlers and got the wait down to about eight minutes; the complaints

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

A waiting room is the purest in-between place most people meet — a room whose only job is to hold you. Should it distract you or admit what it is for? A children's clinic can fill the time with color and noise; a room before surgery probably should not pretend you are somewhere else.

Practice — a sample

SOCA firm lets staff decorate their own corners of a new building. Duffy would be MOST likely to call it —

A A design failure
B A costly reform
C A safety measure
D A legal duty
E A cheap peace

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