The Effects of Physical Environment on Students' Perceptions in Home Office Environments

The environmental factors directly affect the persons' perception, comfort, and concentration in working environments. Accordingly, in home office environments, room settings can enhance the preference of the working environment. With this in mind, differently designed home office environments, were assumed to influence the perceptual performance of design students. To verify this hypothesis, six different home office room pictures, were tested by eliciting responses to seven bipolar semantic differential items on a Likert-style scale. According to the results, differences in the environmental settings of each home office room had an important influence on the perceptual evaluations of design students. Environmental factors such as materials or dimensions of the furniture's were observed to have an effect on whether participants perceived the environments positively or negatively. These results show that preparing an optimal environment would encourage the pleasure and motivation of studying or working on the design students.