Prospect, Refuge, and the Architecture of Attention

For decades, architects and designers have relied on Prospect-Refuge Theory to explain why some spaces simply feel better than others. First proposed in 1975 by geographer Jay Appleton in “The Experience of Landscape,” the theory suggests that people prefer environments where they can comfortably see their surroundings — known as prospect — while also feeling protected from behind — referred to as refuge. Appleton linked this preference to a survival instinct: the need to observe and be aware of potential threats while remaining protected from them. It helps explain why people instinctively gravitate toward a booth in a restaurant or a seat against a wall rather than an exposed chair in the open. Applied to the workplace, this raises a practical question: can a desk’s orientation influence the cognitive effort required to sustain attention? 

Within interior settings specifically, researchers have used an expanded version of Prospect-Refuge Theory to analyze architectural spaces in terms of psychological wellbeing. Results reveal that preferred environments share four principle components:

1. A space must include a view or a point of outlook
2. That view must be partially framed or enclosed
3. A degree of visual complexity enhances feelings of safety
4. A sense of mystery (implying discoverability) is preferred¹

Testing prospect and refuge in the workplace

The workstation layouts below illustrate the four desk configurations that were evaluated by six adults with ADHD across both an enclosed private office and an open-plan workspace. While each arrangement maintained the same work tasks, they varied the participants’ relationship to circulation, visibility, and environmental exposure through changes in desk orientation.

Key insights

Enclosure does the heavy lifting

Within the enclosed private office, changing the desk orientation produced little difference in EEG activity across the four workstation layouts. The surrounding enclosure appeared to moderate the influence of desk orientation, suggesting the room itself reduced the cognitive demands associated with monitoring the surrounding environment.

Participants’ perceptions, however, revealed a more nuanced story. While orientation did not meaningfully change neural activity, it did influence how the space was experienced. The side-wall orientation was linked to higher perceived concentration and lower fatigue. In contrast, the back-facing layout, where a glass door left participants more exposed to activity behind them, increased feelings of insecurity by sixty-seven percent, despite participants reporting strong concentration.

Viewed through the lens of Prospect-Refuge Theory, these perceptions are telling. Layouts that better balanced awareness of the surrounding space with reduced exposure from behind were experienced with more comfort; arrangements with a weakened sense of refuge, however, increased feelings of vulnerability. Although the enclosed office appeared to buffer these affects physiologically, participants still recognized subtle differences in comfort and security that aligned with the theory’s central principles.

Open floorplans tell a different story

The open-plan workspace told a different story: without the inherent refuge provided by an enclosed office, subtle changes in desk orientation corresponded with meaningful differences in neural activity associated with cognitive demand.

Interestingly, the spine-facing layout revealed a more nuanced finding. By maintaining a solid wall behind the participant while partially blocking the outward view with a privacy screen, this set-up produced the strongest task performance despite offering lower prospect than the benching layout. While exploratory, this finding suggests that the goal may not be maximizing visibility or visual screening, but finding the right balance between environmental awareness and filtering unnecessary visual distractions.

Comfort and cognition can diverge

Across both workplace settings, subjective experience and physiological response did not always move together. In the enclosed office, participants perceived meaningful differences in concentration, fatigue, and security despite little change in EEG activity. In the open office, workstation orientation corresponded with measurable differences in cognitive demand, yet the back-to-back layout was still perceived as one of the strongest performing configurations.

In the configuration offering the least prospect or refuge — facing a wall with their back exposed — participants did not necessarily rate the experience as stressful. Yet, the physiological data told a different story, revealing elevated cognitive effort, suggesting their brains were working harder to maintain focus even when effort wasn’t consciously registered.

Implications for workplace design

While the findings come from a small pilot study, they point to a design principle worth taking seriously: in open environments where sensory input is harder to control, something as simple as desk orientation can change how much effort it takes to stay focused.

Rather than reconfiguring walls or expanding square footage, researchers altered only the orientation of the desks, a single adjustment that corresponded with a measurable shift in cognitive effort. The result offers organizations a compelling signal for where to direct investment in inclusive design: some of the highest-impact interventions may also be among the most economical.

The workstation layout findings represent an exploratory analysis conducted with a subset of participants from the broader study. As such, they should be considered hypothesis-generating rather than conclusive, providing an early evidence base to inform future research and workplace design.