The evidence behind every school we design.
Twenty-six years of post-occupancy research across 200+ schools in 59 countries — measuring how learning environments shape student health, wellbeing, and the capacity to learn. Five books, 29+ papers, three assessment tools, and a Harvard University partnership.
The question that organizes everything we do.
EDI operates one of the field's most active in-house research departments — sustained over twenty-six years, focused on a single question that organizes everything we publish, build, and measure: how do learning environments shape student health, wellbeing, and the capacity to learn?
Most firms design schools. We study them — then design them.
Our research department employs full-time architects, educators, and a PhD-led research director. It is not a content team that produces white papers between projects — it is the spine of how the firm thinks.
Every design pattern we propose has been observed, measured, and correlated with student outcomes in real schools. When we say a strategy works, we can show you the buildings where it has.
Five books, nearly thirty papers, three assessment tools, and continuous open writing. Our intellectual capital is part of the global record — not locked inside a sales process.
How we know what actually works.
Of longitudinal field data.
Our evaluations span 200+ schools across 59 countries and six continents, giving us a dataset large enough to distinguish what improves outcomes from what merely follows fashion.
Post-occupancy evaluation
Design patterns, correlated with achievement and wellbeing.
A working vocabulary distilled from twenty-six years of practice — each pattern grounded in evidence, each one available to school communities co-creating their own learning environments.
Pattern library · Open methodology
Renovation ROI vs. new builds.
Well-designed renovations achieve 85% of the learning gains found in new builds — at a fraction of the cost. This finding has reshaped how districts and trustees we work with prioritize capital.
Comparative outcomes analysis
Schools that don't just teach children, but keep them well.
Across our books, papers, and field studies, a single organizing focus has emerged: the relationship between the built environment and student health, mental wellbeing, and the capacity to learn.
Our books treat wellbeing as multidimensional — physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and environmental — and ask, chapter by chapter, what architectural choices serve each dimension. Our research director, Dr. Parul Minhas, leads a programme of work in salutogenic design: architecture that actively promotes health rather than merely avoiding harm.
Alongside Prakash Nair's framework of "Wellbeing for Learning," this research has produced full chapters on neuroarchitecture, biophilic design, outdoor learning, sensory regulation, and the design of spaces that support neurodiverse learners — drawing on neuroscience, environmental psychology, and twenty-six years of post-occupancy work.
Dedicated chapters on Salutogenic Design, Neuroarchitecture, Biophilic Design
Each is a full chapter of A New Language of School Design (A4LE, 2023) — alongside chapters on outdoor learning, urban school greening, and choice architecture for holistic wellbeing.
Building Minds — Connection & Coherence
Our 2024 book organizes school design around four kinds of connection (self, others, environment, transcendence), drawing on Maslow, Vygotsky, E.O. Wilson and Csikszentmihalyi.
Wellbeing for Learning
Prakash Nair's overarching framework, applied across every EDI project — paired with Dr. Parul Minhas's specialist research in salutogenic design and health-promoting school environments.
Four ways into twenty-six years of work.
Five full-length books — over 1,000 pages of research synthesis.
From the foundational Language of School Design (2005) and the Harvard Education Press title Blueprint for Tomorrow, to A New Language of School Design — the first book ever commissioned by the Association for Learning Environments in its 100+ year history. Learning by Design (2020) was developed with the late Dr. Richard F. Elmore, Professor Emeritus at Harvard.
Most recent
Building Minds — Designing Learning Spaces for Connection & Coherence (A4LE, 2024)
See all booksResearch briefs on the questions school leaders are asking now.
Topics span outdoor learning, biophilic design, post-pandemic school architecture, neuroarchitecture, the failures of open-plan offices applied to schools, and student health and wellbeing — several published in collaboration with the Association for Learning Environments (A4LE).
Featured
Outdoor Learning: Leave the Classroom Behind — published with A4LE
Browse white papersProprietary instruments your school can use today.
Our Facilities Assessment, Scale of Modernity, Health & Well-Being, and Social & Emotional Readiness apps turn twenty-six years of research into instruments educators can run on their own campuses — generating reports, benchmarks, and design conversations.
New
Health & Well-Being and Social & Emotional Readiness assessments — now live
Explore the toolsCurrent thinking, published continuously.
Short-form essays on the questions our work raises — from The Classroom Is Obsolete to Beyond Neurodiversity as a Label. Written by our research team, our architects, and our educators-in-residence.
Latest
Designing for Epistemic Humility
Read articlesA working partnership with the institution that defines learning research.
Our Harvard connection runs through three distinct channels — publication, instruction, and co-authorship — sustained over more than a decade.
Harvard Education Press
Prakash Nair's Blueprint for Tomorrow: Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning was published by Harvard Education Press in 2014. Its central argument — that America has an opportunity to modernize over $2 trillion in obsolete school infrastructure — has made it Harvard's most widely read reference title on school facility design.
Harvard edX · Leaders of Learning
Prakash Nair contributes to the Harvard edX course Leaders of Learning, which has reached 423,000 educators worldwide — making it one of Harvard edX's most highly subscribed courses.
The Elmore collaboration
Our 2020 book Learning by Design: Live | Play | Engage | Create was developed with the late Dr. Richard F. Elmore, Harvard Professor Emeritus — a collaboration that bridged learning theory and the architectural decisions that enact it. The book also carries a foreword by Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs.
The people behind the evidence base.
Prakash Nair, AIA
Architect, futurist, and author of five full-length books on school design. His Blueprint for Tomorrow (Harvard Education Press, 2014) frames America's aging school infrastructure as "the $2 trillion mistake." A New Language of School Design (2023), co-edited with Dr. Parul Minhas, is the first book ever commissioned by the Association for Learning Environments in its 100+ year history. Recipient of the A4LE MacConnell Award — the highest international honor for school design — and the A4LE Kelly Tanner Award (2023). TEDx speaker, Harvard edX instructor on Leaders of Learning, three-time consecutive keynote at EduTECH Australia, and author of EDI's "Wellbeing for Learning" research framework.
Dr. Parul Minhas
PhD in Architecture, with a Master's in Urban Design. Dr. Minhas leads EDI's research department, having joined the firm in 2022 after nearly a decade in academia. She is co-editor of A New Language of School Design (A4LE, 2023) — the first book ever commissioned by the Association for Learning Environments — and lead author of Building Minds (A4LE, 2024). Her research specialty is salutogenic design, neuroarchitecture, and health-promoting school environments. She also leads the design and stewardship of EDI's proprietary assessment apps, and is an invited speaker at conferences across Asia, Europe and the Americas.
The stages where this research gets shared.
Our research reaches educators on the stages where school leaders gather.
Prakash Nair, AIA
- EduTECH Australia — keynote, three consecutive years (2017–2019)
- EduBUILD — keynote, Sydney
- TEDx Guilford College — Design for Learning in the Creative Age
- Harvard edX — instructor, Leaders of Learning
- A4LE Leadership Conference — multiple presentations
- ARISE-FICCI School Education Conference
- Keynotes in 30+ countries across six continents
Dr. Parul Minhas
- A4LE Conferences — four-time presenter
- EARCOS — East Asia Regional Council of Schools
- Mind Body Space, Barcelona
- TAISI — The Association of International Schools of India
- ARISE-FICCI School Education Conference
- Bibliotheqa & partner webinars — global online series
- Specialist invitations on salutogenic design and neuroarchitecture
Academic Partnerships
Active collaboration with Harvard Education Press, the Association for Learning Environments (A4LE), and university research groups studying the built environment's role in learning and wellbeing.
TEDx & Online Talks
Prakash Nair's TEDx talk Design for Learning in the Creative Age continues to reach educators and architects worldwide — alongside his contributions to Harvard's Leaders of Learning course on edX.
Open Methodology
Our assessment frameworks — including the 28 Design Patterns and the Healthy School Assessment Tool — are documented openly so educators, architects, and researchers outside EDI can apply and critique them.
Educator-in-Residence
Veteran international educators on every project ensure that what we research is what teachers and students actually experience — closing the loop between hypothesis, design, and lived practice.
Continuous Publication
New articles, essays, and research notes published on a rolling basis — original writing by our research director, architects, and educators-in-residence, syndicated across the EDI site and global professional networks.
Field Studies
Ongoing post-occupancy evaluation of completed EDI projects — feeding measured outcomes back into the next generation of design patterns, and into the schools we are currently planning.
A note on our methods: we publish our research protocols, our assessment instruments, and the evidence behind our design patterns — because work that can be checked is work worth standing behind.
Bring this research to your campus.
Whether you are building new or transforming what you have, our research team can begin with a Healthy School Assessment of your existing environment — and a Discovery Call with our director of research.