Place, People, and Policy: Dr. Michael Ralph's Interdisciplinary Approach to Design Research
Dr. Ralph is also the co-leader of the Coalition for the Advanced Understanding of School Environments (CAUSE), which brings together design researchers, leading architecture firms, and school district partners to improve educational outcomes for students. An interdisciplinary practitioner, Dr. Ralph also applies his background as a methodologist across our studios.
The following conversation charts Dr. Ralph’s esteemed journey as a researcher and describes the implications of his work for our multidisciplinary firm.
Michael Ralph: The first couple of papers that I published prior to coming on board at Multistudio looked at the experiences of women in chemistry education and movement through spaces. I'd been developing my ability to implement QuantCrits, which is a theoretical, formalized framework for quantitative practice that is focused on issues of justice and inclusion. I was thinking a lot about how to be an advocate for gender inclusion. This was my existing passion.
Michael Ralph: When I saw that they were connected. It was really just a right-place, right-time, right-question situation. I was teaching research methods at the University of Kansas, where I was full-time teaching staff. I recognized I needed to be immersed in research practices and methods to do that work well, and there was a meeting with people interested in doing scholarship and teaching and learning at the university.
One day, we had a presentation from a chemistry professor. The chemistry professor was talking about using some of the new active learning spaces on campus, and he was sharing what it was like to teach in them. Toward the end, the professor shared that in the new active learning spaces, there's a much larger fraction of honors students who are using those spaces. And then there was kind of a lull in the presentation.
So, I asked, “Are there any other differences in how people are enrolling in that space compared to the old lecture theater where you also teach a section of the course?” The professor said, “Well, I guess I would say there's also quite a few more women who enroll in the active learning spaces.” And I asked, “Oh, why? And he said, “I don't know.” And what piqued my interest was if there are women who prefer one space over another. Knowing how often they are pushed out of chemistry tracks and chemistry degrees in the chemistry profession, this seemed important.
Much like my work at Multistudio, my interest began with hearing from someone with particular expertise and noticing that their work connects to a priority. What was interesting was the opportunity for meaningful impact. I was becoming aware of just how important the environmental design was to explaining where educational impacts were coming from.
Michael Ralph: I wouldn't call it core, no. I was familiar with UDL. I talked about UDL a little bit when I was still focused on practice, especially when I was teaching in the high school classroom. But when I came on board at Multistudio, I learned more about the Deck of Spaces™ from David Reid, a leader in our education design practice, and how he'd been applying it to space design, and I sort of experienced a renaissance. I very quickly got on board with continuing the tradition of developing UDL.
My research reflects our guiding principle of identifying where we can have an impact, whatever the project typology might be.
Michael Ralph: We’ve been invested in UDL for a long time at Multistudio. I would go so far as saying we’re the world leader in architectural firms partnering on developing UDL applications to space design. That’s not just us self-aggrandizing. It’s just factually true.
We've been collaborating with some of the leaders in scholarship on UDL as a component of our work for a while, and one real gap in that body of literature is connecting UDL and space design interventions and how these influence expressions of UDL and instruction.
Our industry badly needs research connecting UDL and instruction and experience to final outcomes with students. There's a lot of UDL research that says people like it. There's not nearly as much research saying that it's leading to effective impacts on outcomes. We talked with Steelcase, one of our research partners, and what we found was that our research expertise and my expertise in quantitative methods allowed us to include some measures of student learning and some measures of socio-emotional outcomes for students, which is also sorely lacking in the existing UDL literature.
We were also having conversations with researchers at the University of Kansas, who were thinking about UDL applications broadly, and we were able to connect some dots between space design interventions, UDL experiences in classrooms, and downstream outcomes for students. We saw that there was this opportunity to develop space design while also addressing pretty important questions in the disciplinary scholarship.
Michael Ralph: Frankly, it's just very exciting — and even relieving. You theorize something for so long, and you invest a lot of time and money in the whole project. To have it come out in the metrics is really validating, considering how much time we spend talking about impact and seeing it borne out in the numbers.
This validation brings me back to the importance of continuing to build on that work. The study is also a reminder of how much further we have yet to go in being able to parse which kinds of design interventions are really leading to these impacts and for whom. It opens as many new questions as it answers.
That's kind of what leads us to initiatives like my work with CAUSE, because we're going to have to work together to do it. There's just not any other financially sustainable way to get the level of sample size that people are used to seeing and to have the level of sophistication in the analysis necessary to kind of make the next step in that argument.
Michael Ralph: The architecture firms that I believe are doing the best work in this space all have certain things in common. We all have formally trained researchers with effective practices in research analysis and data sharing, along with fundamental constructs that a lot of us agree on.
For example, I show up and give my presentation on belonging, and then Dr. Erika Eitland of Perkins&Will shows up, and she gives her presentation on belonging. What we're finding is that even though we all have different perspectives, we also have ideas in common. When we began CAUSE, we believed that we ought to say it out loud — let's embrace that we have some things in common, so we can do more impactful work across the industry.
It’s exhilarating to uncover surprising, compelling, and truly differentiable value for clients.
Michael Ralph: I joined Multistudio to work across the entirety of our national practice. Although I was in education before I came on board here, my actual training and my Ph.D. are in methodology, using quantitative methods and analyzing quantitative data.
My Ph.D. is in educational psychology, which is a social science, but my first few degrees are in biology, which is a natural science. Bringing that skill set to all our projects has always been a priority. Although I have deep stories to tell in education because it's an area of passion and my original background, I've always collaborated with our workplace team since very early on. Because we are a general practice, being a part of the best civic projects or workplace projects and knowing what's happening in those fields can help me come back to a school and say, “Well, students are really seeing this is effective in some extracurricular learning environments, and this is what they could expect when they start their career in the workplace.”
Cross-pollination keeps the research potent. It continues to surface helpful questions rather than losing track of the forest for the one tree you're looking at. It makes all our studies better.
Michael Ralph: We have one “lighthouse” project each year — one major line of inquiry that we really delve into, where I'm investing significant amounts of time, purely because we want to go deeper.
This year’s lighthouse project is in our STEAM Studio, the 501(c)(3) we co-founded with Rockhurst University, which is located within our Kansas City studio. We’ve done a refresh on this space after developing a whole body of research that occurred right around when I came onboard. We gained a great deal of insight into how teachers and students are using more flexible approaches and less conventional designs in classroom spaces.
I did some consulting on that study, but I wasn't a major contributor to its design. We’d been trying to think about what we could do with the next iteration of that space to continue to get more value out of it, and began having conversations with Muzo, our furniture partner. They introduced me to the idea of social ergonomics.
Michael Ralph: Social ergonomics is not very well represented in the literature, yet intuitively this concept represents a missing area of research connecting physical space and design that's already got this really deep well of design research.
Then there’s ergonomics, which is a recognizable, familiar field of study; yet, with social ergonomics, you have this interface between physical space and social interactions and dynamics that is not very thoroughly explored.
Social ergonomics became a satisfying kind of pitch for how we could structure the way that physical space was supporting, sustaining, and inviting physical interactions in classrooms. But that was not theorized at all.
Our task was to start to put some empirical work around this concept and do some theoretical development. We recognized that we could look at some of the Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) work that we do in our civic practice area. On one of our civic projects, we'd been doing some heat mapping and movement-through-space type studies, and there was an opportunity to lay over some of that heat mapping in an updated version of STEAM Studio and pair it with some social measures to look at how people are feeling and moving through the space.
My hope is that this will let us answer this question of how physical space is facilitating social interaction. So, it was kind of this moment where we had various lines of discussion within the operations of STEAM Studio: the compelling ideas of some of our thought partners, along with some of the methodological tools that were developing in some of our other market types. The opportunity to connect those dots is exciting. We just started data collection yesterday.
The interdisciplinary nature of my practice is an important piece of my work. If I were to tell the story of my work in any given year, it's going to sound much like what I’ve described with gender inclusion, UDL, and our STEAM Studio. We’re talking to interesting people, we're making connections to seemingly disparate domains of knowledge, we’re trying to make those connections to add to our understanding, and ultimately bring some new value to our clients that is not really happening anywhere else.
There's a study that’s in the peer review process where we're studying implementations of UDL from course syllabi and asking how expressions of UDL show up in the way that instructors craft syllabi. Notice you didn't hear me say classroom anywhere in there. But I think we're supportive of that kind of work because we really do believe that staying curious about what's important to our clients helps us better understand their needs.
It speaks to our priority of being curious and not making prior assumptions. My research reflects our guiding principle of identifying where we can have an impact, whatever the project typology might be. If it's belonging, we really want to understand how impact happens holistically across place, people, and policy. We want to fully understand what opportunities exist for design, rather than just saying, if we're only looking at the building, then, you know, to a hammer, the whole world is nails.
The rejection of prior assumptions about what is important from a research standpoint means that we sometimes follow paths that seemingly point in an unusual direction. But it’s exhilarating to uncover surprising, compelling, and truly differentiated value for clients. It's the kind of work I want to do. I enjoy being broadly curious and walking that wandering path. As researchers, that's very literally when we're at our best.
Visit the Mulistudio Research Center to view specific projects led by Dr. Ralph, including impact studies and post-occupancy evaluations.
