Maximising seat count without equal attention to sightlines produced learning spaces where a meaningful portion of seats had a genuinely poor view of the board, undermining the value of those seats regardless of how the capacity figure looked on paper.

This problem often went unaddressed for years simply because it wasn’t measured directly, showing up instead as vague, hard-to-pin-down student feedback about certain seats feeling less engaging than others.

A specific figure some universities have found through post-occupancy surveys: as many as 15 to 20 percent of seats in older, capacity-optimised learning spaces report meaningfully worse board visibility than the average seat, a gap invisible in any seating capacity figure alone.

Designing around sightlines from the outset affects seating rake, room shape and board size together, rather than treating the board as an afterthought fitted into a room already designed around maximum seat count.

New-build and major refurbishment learning space projects increasingly specify sightline requirements and board sizing calculations as part of the initial brief, rather than as a later addition once the room’s core layout is fixed.

A concrete example: several UK universities now include a formal sightline assessment as a mandatory stage in new learning space design briefs, a requirement that didn’t exist in equivalent briefs from the early 2010s.

Universities with existing halls that weren’t designed this way can still improve visibility significantly through a properly sized and positioned board retrofit, without needing to rebuild the room entirely.

A relatively modest investment in a properly specified retrofit can meaningfully improve outcomes for students in previously poor-visibility seats, without the cost or disruption of a full room redesign.

As this approach becomes more standard in new learning space briefs, it’s likely to keep spreading rather than remaining limited to a handful of forward-thinking institutions.

See how Chameleon large classroom whiteboards are specified as part of this broader shift toward visibility-first learning space design.