Architects and designers have a great deal to say about the image that rooms can create.  Fitting the image to the message that a room conveys is understandably difficult when that room is to be used for multiple purposes.  What works for one purpose may not work for another.

The Tapestry Room in Firth Court is a case in point.  Over the last few weeks I have - shown it to the cultural attaché from a foreign embassy; hosted a meeting there of careers advisers from local schools; chaired a committee meeting in it; shown it to an alumnus of around 25 years ago; hosted a celebration of NSS success in it; and seen it used as break-out space for an outreach event with local school children.  The alumnus was (I think) impressed; the cultural attaché found it interesting but unimpressive; the careers advisers seemed a little overawed by it (or perhaps that was me); the committee took it for granted (they meet there regularly); and the school children didn't quite know how to behave in it since it is so different from the teaching environments they are used to in school (or that they will experience here).

(For those who have never been in the room, it contains a large historical tapestry on a mythical theme, a modern tapestry depicting the subjects taught at the university, a series of portrait drawings of the early professors of the university - all male, one or two other objets d'art and a portrait bust of David Blunkett - as well as ranged chairs and tables.)

Today I took some visitors from a new university to a meeting in the John Carr Library in the Mappin Building at St Georges.  They immediately expressed their view of how impressive the room is.  It conveys a spirit of the solidity of learning and of the confidence of those who built it.  We quickly moved on to the fact, however, that it now houses largely redundant old journals stock and is scarcely in active use as a library - instead serving as a meetings room (but one with rather poor acoustics for that purpose).  We do, of course, use the room when we want to impress: I recall some years ago the university hosting a meeting of the committee of the Headmasters Conference (the gathering of inpdendent schools) and choosing to do so in the John Carr Library. I suppose we were trying to match the ambience of Charterhouse, Haileybury or, more locally, Worksop College.

One building to which everyone, in my experience, has the same reaction is the Information Commons.  Having chaired the Project Executive Group that oversaw its construction, I have taken innumerable visitors around that - groups from foreign universities, Vice-Chancellors from UK institutions, student representatives from other universities, Lord Mayors (or perhaps that should be Lords Mayor), parents of students, candidates for admission.  The reaction when they all get up to the first floor is a universal 'wow'.  And clearly the Information Commons plays a major role in putting us at number 2 place in the national survey of student experience published in this week's Times Higher.

We who work in the university probably take the image of most of our buildings and rooms for granted.  Perhaps we should pay greater attention to the messages that they convey to those coming into use of them for the first time.