As the data gathered from observations provide insight into why students choose certain study areas, it can then be used to understand how the designs can be improved. A strong example of this is the lack of charging capability outside. Since all students were working on personal devices, the inability to access outdoor outlets strongly influenced when a student can work outside. Thus, future designers can implement outdoor outlets to make their spaces useful to more students. Additionally, since numerous students eat outdoors, being aware of this behavior can make the design more conscious. For example, the outdoor areas themselves did not have many trashcans. This meant many students had to store their trash on their own. While this does not keep students from working outside, being conscious about having available trashcans helps make the space more accommodating.
However, while these observations can help improve design, not all reflect design solutions. This can be exemplified in the sound differences between indoor and outdoor areas. While the location of an outdoor space can be chosen to avoid some noise, an outdoor area is open to varying surroundings. This means that, regarding sound, outdoor study spaces can not be as controlled. Thereby, it highlights that outdoor and indoor study spaces are fundamentally different.
Hollsitically, these improvements show that the current trends in outdoor designs work well with students and their needs. Nonetheless, these design precedents also reflect a lack of understanding of what students do. This gap in understanding does not negate the outdoor study spaces; instead, it simply makes the design of these spaces not completely practical. One can then see the clear path to improving spaces that already work but can work better for modern students.
In the future, one can expand upon this research in numerous ways. Firstly, this paper focuses on indoor and outdoor informal study spaces. This creates the opportunity for more research on how college students react to indoor and outdoor learning. Secondly, this paper gathered all data around the same time. Thus, what was going on both in the weather and students’ lives had an overarching impact on the data. This could be accounted for through more long-term research where the same areas were studied over and over. These forms of additional research would allow the suggestions for improved future designs to become more nuanced.