Originally written by Michelle Carpenter. Updated by Natural Pod on March 30, 2026.
A child walks into a classroom and within seconds, they start making sense of the space. The light. The colors. The level of visual noise on the walls. Before a single lesson begins, the room already impacts how the child feels and how ready they are to learn.
What happens when the child is put at the center of every decision? Sarah Diggle, founder of Purpose Preschool in Alberta, Canada, believes this to be the essential design principle that guided her well-loved Montessori preschool, and demonstrates a perfect example of this in practice.
For educational leaders like her, it’s not just intuition leading them.
A study on the impact of classroom design found that the physical design of a classroom accounted for 16% of the difference in how much children learned over a single school year. Seven design factors made a measurable difference, among them ownership, color, and visual complexity.
At Natural Pod, we think about this research like when designing a learning space. Our goal is to create what we call a calm canvas: a visual foundation that allows children to be the most vibrant thing in the room.