Higher education students’ difficulties, especially students in architecture education lead students to health problems. The design studio is the heart of architecture education and students spent most of their time with staff. Students tend to do various activities in the studio such as demonstrating, model-making, drawing, and lecturing. Therefore, the learning environment in the studio should attract students to spend most of their time in the studio happily. This research focused on a mixed method to assess the relationship between students’ wellbeing and the quality learning environment in the design studio. The students’ self-report assessment for the wellbeing situation has been used that depends on students experience in the design studio. For this reason, architecture design studios at private universities in Erbil city have been selected as a case study. The statistical program SPSS has been used to test hypotheses and analyze data. The findings of this study represent the significant positive relationship between students’ wellbeing and the quality learning environment in the design studio. Furthermore, the study illustrates the significance of the quality learning environment in the design studio and its role in the development of the student’s wellbeing.

PurposeSpaciousness is defined as “the feeling of openness or room to wander” that has been affected by various physical factors. The purpose of this paper is to assess the spaciousness of space to determine how spacious the space is. Furthermore, the study intends to propose a fuzzy-based model to assess the degree of spaciousness in terms of physical parameters such as area, proportion, the ratio of window area to floor area and color value.Design/methodology/approachFuzzy logic is the most appropriate mathematical model to assess uncertainty using nonhomogeneous variables. In contrast to conventional methods, fuzzy logic depends on partial truth theory. MATLAB Fuzzy Logic Toolbox was used as a computational model including a fuzzy inference system (FIS) using linguistic variables called membership functions to define parameters. As a result, fuzzy logic was used in this study to assess the spaciousness degree of design studios in universities in the Iraqi Kurdistan region.FindingsThe findings of the presented fuzzy model show the degree to which the input variables affect a space perceived as larger and more spacious. The relationship between parameters has been represented in three-dimensional surface diagrams. The positive relationship of spaciousness with the area, window-to-floor area ratio and color value has been determined. In contrast, the negative relationship between spaciousness and space proportion is described. Moreover, the three-dimensional surface diagram illustrates how the changes in the input values affect the spaciousness degree. Besides, the improvement in the spaciousness degree of the design studio increases the quality learning environment.Originality/valueThis study attempted to assess the degree of spaciousness in design studios. There has been no attempt carried out to combine educational space learning environments and computational methods. This study focused on the assessment of spaciousness using the MATLAB Fuzzy Logic toolbox that has not been integrated so far.