What does a truly human learning environment look like in a world of exponential technological change? What does it feel like? And who gets to be inside of it?
Those were the questions at the center of Still Human in Learning, a panel conversation hosted at One Workplace in Santa Clara as part of the Steelcase Connecting Communities Hybrid Work Tour. Joined by Joanna Messer, Director of Library and Learning Support Services at West Valley College, and Ashly Vineyard, Project Interior Designer at ABA Studio, Jason Peat from Steelcase led a conversation that was grounded, specific, and deeply human, anchored in a real building, a real campus, with real students finding their way.
A Building Built for What's Next
The West Valley College Learning Resource Commons has been years in the making, the project began in 2019, wound through a pandemic, and opened in late 2024. In that time, the team didn't just renovate a building. They reimagined what a community college learning space could be.
The building footprint stayed the same. Nearly everything else changed. The original building was dark, disconnected from campus, and, notably, had no bathrooms. Today, the LRC is flooded with natural light from new curtain walls and eight skylights. It faces the main campus. It houses a library, a tutoring success center, digital media recording studios, a café, makerspace, adjunct faculty hubs, a children's story corner, and spaces for a program that didn't even exist when the building was designed.
"When I walked in on day one," Joanna said, "I felt ready to invite people in and invite students to make it their home."
That wasn't an accident.
The Design Philosophy: Choice as a Foundation
One of the most consistent threads throughout the conversation was choice…not as a design flourish, but as a fundamental human need.
Ashly described how the team mapped each zone of the building not by aesthetic category, but by function: what does this specific space need to do for the people in it? The answers weren't uniform. A tutoring booth needs different qualities than a makerspace, which needs different qualities than a meditation room or a café. Rather than replicating one solution across the building, the team designed each space intentionally, and then connected them into a coherent whole.
Color played a quiet but powerful role. Warm tones, burnt reds and ambers, were used in higher-energy, more collaborative zones. Cooler blues and greens carried into the individual study carrels and meditation spaces. "When you're in the building," Ashley explained, "you kind of just feel it. The warm tones are more energetic. The cool tones are more calming." Signage reinforced it, but the spatial language did the work first.
Furniture selection went through a sit test with real faculty and students. The team thought carefully about comfort, ergonomic enough to support focus, but not so soft that you'd fall asleep. Half-height shelving throughout the library opened sightlines from one end of the building to the other, allowed natural light to penetrate deep into the space, and perhaps surprisingly, improved acoustics by reducing the surface area for sound to travel and bounce.
And where there is power, people sit. The team knew this going in. Rather than fighting it, they designed around it, working with manufacturers early to bring power through the furniture itself, eliminating the need for floor cores while ensuring that nearly every seat in the building had access to an outlet.
What AI Can't Do
No conversation about learning environments in 2026 goes long without touching artificial intelligence. This one was no different, and both panelists had something grounded and specific to say.
"AI can tutor a student, but only so far," Joanna said. "That human connection, the conversation that happens between people in a space that's intentionally designed for their engagement, that's something AI just can't touch."
Ashly added her perspective as a lecturer at San Jose State’s design program: students who are confused don't always know how to ask the right question. They look at the screen, then look at the teacher. That moment of visible frustration or dawning understanding, the light bulb moment, is something no algorithm can replicate or replace. "You're never going to lose that human connection just because of the frustrations," she said. "And I don't think you should."
What came through clearly is that physical learning spaces do something AI fundamentally cannot: they hold space. They give students somewhere to be that doesn't require a purchase, a login, or a screen. They provide a community to belong to. The LRC sees 4,400 visits per week on a headcount of 7,000 students, not because the app is good, but because the building makes people feel like they matter.
Designing for Belonging at Scale
The success center at the heart of the LRC is run by 42 peer tutors who cover every academic discipline in the college. By design, they all work in the same shared space: individual booths for focused tutoring, but open enough to create community. Students from different programs collide. Disciplines cross-pollinate. Connections form that wouldn't happen if each tutor had their own room.
Joanna described watching a peer tutor lead a biology session, moving between pods, pushing content to shared screens, drawing students into conversation without missing a beat. "I could see little light bulbs going off over people's heads," she said. "It warmed my heart."
She also described the ESL conversation group that meets in the lounge area, laughing as they practice English while looking out at the trees that surround West Valley's 143-acre campus. These unscripted, unhurried, human moments are what the building was built to make possible.
The Truths That Don't Change
Toward the end of the conversation, Jason asked the panel to name the things that are simply always true about what a person needs from a learning environment, regardless of age, background, or what decade it is.
The answers were refreshingly basic: good natural light, clean air, comfortable temperatures, accessible power, spaces that are inspiring without being overstimulating, and the ability to choose where and how you work. These aren't luxury amenities. They're baseline dignity.
And yet as Ashly noted from her experience teaching at San Jose State, a building without adequate HVAC can undo all of it. "On those hot days of summer, the focus just isn't there."
The hardest part of learning environment design isn't the vision. It's making sure the fundamentals are right first and then elevating from there.
Place Still Matters
As Jason put it at the close of the conversation: "The most important thing a learning space can do is make a person feel like they belong."
That's not a soft sentiment. It's a design brief. It shapes where you put the bathrooms, how you route the power, which way the building faces, whether the shelves are tall or low, and how many user group meetings you hold before you finalize a single finish selection. (For this project: 45 meetings with 30+ stakeholders.)
The result is a building that is still finding itself three months into full occupancy, with programs still moving in and new uses still emerging, but one that is already unmistakably working. Students are there. They stay. They come back.
In a world where attention is under siege and technology promises to replace every friction in the learning process, West Valley's Learning Resource Commons is a quiet argument for something different: that place still matters, that the physical environment still shapes who we become, and that design, done with intention and care, is still one of the most powerful tools we have for helping people feel seen.
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One Workplace is proud to partner with Steelcase on the Connecting Communities Hybrid Work Tour. To learn more about learning environment design and our work in education, visit our team HERE.