This event took place online on 25 May 2021 during the Covid-19 crisis. An international audience gathered with a panel with representatives from the UK, Europe and the USA to discuss how designers can create a more people-focused built environment.
You can review the recording of the event in full. Many who wanted to attend were unable to and it also repays revisiting the rich discussion generated by a diverse panel.
The Conversation is chaired by Anna Wendt of Buro Happold. She frames the discussion as a challenge to designers to think more broadly about what they create: along with the traditional client concerns of budget, performance and aesthetic we should be encouraging positive change in our impact on society. As an engineer she can draw on many specialisms, but she advocates developing a wider understating around climate, ecology and humanitarian concerns. ‘Are the environments we create inclusive, accessible, safe and climate-friendly?’ she asks.
Simon Wright looks beyond empathy to what he sees as a more pressing need – one planet design, or heading off the environmental catastrophe that will be caused by climate change. He does not examine the relationship between these concerns (are they always complementary?), but implies that there is a need to ‘inspire people’ in order to take the action required. Behaviour change is imperative in his view and therefore engineers, as part of a broader design community, need to become ‘radical persuasive agents for change’. They need to become bolder and think differently he suggests and pursue advocacy on behalf of the planet along with empathy for people.
Lily Bernheimer of Space Works is an environmental psychologist working in California. She believes that understanding the behavior of city users helps us make a built environment that is more empathetic. She provides an example of a project undertaken for Vision Zero whose aim is to reduce city road-based deaths to zero over time. Analysis of the behavior of pedestrians provided some guideline to the mapping of desire lines and deployment of street furniture which could replace guardrails which were not always as effective as imagined. A small example but indicative of the huge potential of environmental psychology in shaping our cities.
Ben Channon is an architect whose interest in health and wellbeing stems from personal experience at work and the place where he lived. This led to a deep exploration of the links between the built environment, anxiety, mental and physical health culminating in a book “Happy by Design’. He references such things as potentially toxic building materials and access to outdoor space as important things designers can control. More entrenched is the social inequity of such things as clean air in cities that disproportionately affects disadvantaged communities. He questions whether the current architectural education system has enough of a focus on designing healthy places for body and mind.
Wolf Mangeldorf is trained as an architect and engineer working out of New York City. He believes that to address the needs of the end users properly – thereby making our design more empathetic – we need to refine the process of design itself. In a deadline-driven world the design process is too often linear and in pursuit of functional detail in isolation. We should think more about what is good for people, he suggests: “quality of life should be at the heart of the design agenda” hand in hand with the health of the planet. Too often we start from the ‘pieces’ we design rather than those ‘boundary conditions’. In his view we get there by developing a ‘middle way’ which combines the best of a top-down and bottom up approach which is more transparent and allows the exploration of different scenarios.
Heidi Creighton provides sustainability consulting and people-focused strategies at the building, masterplanning and portfolio scales. She brings all of these themes together in a comprehensive overview of the issues, putting people at the core of her work. Starting with a historical perspective of how electricity made our lives so ‘easy’ we started focusing on the wrong things and creating ‘buildings that make us sick’, she describes how we now have the research, analytical tools and processes to inform ‘human-centric design’. This is illustrated through two case studies which show the major strides forward that are being made in the design community. “We need to approach every project with elements which make us fulfilled and happy” she states, referring to the ‘triple bottom line: people, planet, profit’ which is a critical lens to use throughout design and decision-making.
The audience conversation focuses on a number of aspects of the topic; definitions of ‘equity’ and what this implies, sources of information around materials and their risk to building occupants and those working in production and emergency services: how to get planners and clients more involved and the economic case for ‘empathy’.
In conclusion Anna Wendt finds much to reflect on for the design community and feels that progress will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Much still needs to be done to move ‘designing with empathy’ from a research activity to mainstream, but the industry appears ready to respond to the challenges of society in the same way as climate change.
The Panel
Panelists
Anna Wendt, Buro Happold Engineering (chairing)
Ben Channon, Ekkist, Guildford, UK
Lily Bernheimer, Founding Director Space Works Consulting, San Francisco, USA
Heidi Creighton, Buro Happold (Sustainability), Los Angeles, USA
Wolf Mangelsdorf, Buro Happold Engineering, New York, USA
Simon Wright OBE, Independent Consultant, London, UK
From top left clockwise to bottom left: Anna Wendt, Ben Channon, Heidi Creighton, Wolf Mangelsdorf, Simon Wright, Lily Bernheimer
Anna Wendt
Anna is a Partner at Buro Happold and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers. She joined Buro Happold in 2007 and has recently taken on the role of Global Façade Engineering Discipline Director. Her focus is on interdisciplinary project delivery, extending her deep technical façade expertise to bring together a range of highly specialist engineering disciplines. Drawing on her strategic specialist advice to clients, architects, contractors, and the expertise within Buro Happold, Anna is able to deliver the highest quality design, engineering and consultancy projects.
Position Statement: The interventions we, as designers and engineers, make to our cities and buildings is hugely impactful on society. We must ensure that we engage with the diversity of the citizens that we are designing these places for, ensuring that inclusiveness is pervasive throughout all of our projects. As engineers we can draw on a range of highly specialist, people centric, disciplines to respond to this need, but in order to effectively apply our technical capabilities to the best effect we must seek to develop a wider understanding and empathy with characteristics we don’t immediately ourselves identify with, particularly those of marginalised groups.
Ben Channon
Ben is an architect, author, TEDx speaker and mental wellbeing advocate, and is well known in the industry as a thought leader in designing for happiness and wellbeing. He is a Director at wellbeing design consultancy Ekkist, where he helps clients and design teams to create healthier places, and researches how buildings and urban design can impact how we feel.
Position Statement: We now have the evidence to prove that the design of the built environment plays an important role in people’s mood and mental wellbeing. I believe we have a moral responsibility therefore to design buildings and cities with compassion and empathy for those who use them. They must be accessible to all, should support people’s lives and allow them to thrive.
Heidi Creighton
Heidi Creighton, FAIA, is an associate principal at Buro Happold and is a LEED Fellow, WELL Faculty, and Fitwel Ambassador. Her work focuses on sustainability and wellness strategies for academic, healthcare, commercial, and residential projects. She provides sustainability consulting at building and master plan scales, as well as 3rd party certification management, post occupancy evaluation, and health and wellbeing-focused design. Heidi is a passionate advocate for a restorative built environment, delivering socially, economically and environmentally sustainable developments.
Lily Bernheimer
Lily Bernheimer is an environmental psychologist, consultant, and author. Pioneering user experience design for the built environment, Lily has worked with organizations like the British Ministry of Justice, Transport for London, and Adam Architecture to make working, living, and urban spaces truly work for the people and purposes they serve. She is Founding Director of Space Works Consulting, author of The Shaping of Us: How Everyday Spaces Structure Our Lives, Behavior, & Well-Being, and writes for Psychology Today. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MSc. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Surrey, where she also served as a Research Fellow. Her research on Wellbeing in Prison Design for the Ministry of Justice was awarded the 2018 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) President’s Award for Research. Her work and writing have been featured in The Guardian, The Evening Standard, Architecture Today, and on the BBC.
Simon Wright
Simon Wright has more than 40 years’ experience in design, construction and programme management and is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He was formerly the Chief Executive of Crossrail and was Director of Infrastructure at the Olympic Delivery Authority. He is currently an independent member of the Sponsor Board for the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal and he is also a Non-Executive Director of the Delivery Authority for R&R. In addition, he has been a member of the High Speed 2 Design Panel since 2017 and provides independent consultancy advice on major programmes to clients in UK and overseas. He is an Institution of Civil Engineers Mentor and supports graduate engineers during their professional development.
Position Statement: Designing with empathy requires suppression of ego and real listening and understanding of users and the wider environment combined with an courage to adopt new ideas and thus to move away from merely meeting initial performance requirements to respond to user’s needs over a lifetime and simultaneously address the climate emergency.
Wolf Mangelsdorf
Wolf Mangelsdorf is a Partner at Buro Happold. Trained as an architect and structural engineer, he has been leading numerous multidisciplinary award-winning projects for the firm, working with some of the world’s best architects. He joined Buro Happold in London in 2002 and transferred to New York in 2017, supporting the rapid growth of the North America team. Wolf has built his reputation as a creative and innovative designer and has written and lectured widely on his project work and the role of engineers in the design process. In May this year he assumed a role as global leader of Design, Design Technology, and Innovation for Buro Happold.
Position Statement: For too long the design process has put the physical buildings and pieces of infrastructure we create at the centre, focussing too little on how they perform for those that use them. We need to turn that on its head and put performative outcomes rather than physical ones at the core of our work, designing for quality of life and environments that are healthy for user and planet. This needs a new engagement with a much wider range of stakeholders and redirection of the process producing a built environment that can morph and grow with those that live in it.