As businesses and employees anticipate a return to commercial workplaces, employee’s wellness is a high priority. Design plays a big part in ensuring that a safe haven can be created indoors,  and while it might not be the first thing that comes to mind as you think about improving the air quality in your building, flooring plays a surprisingly important role in creating a healthy building environment.

How do I choose the perfect flooring colour? This question gets asked a lot by people who are renovating their spaces. Interior designers, decorators and architects study long and hard to master the art of colour matching; but not all stakeholders have that advantage. This can sometimes make this quite a daunting task when trying to find the perfect flooring for a renovation project. However, it doesn’t have to be.

Reading Time: 4 mins 

The b-word ‘biophilia’ has become the latest buzzword to enter the vocabulary of architects and designers alike as we’re slowly seeing the transformation of workspaces changing from grey to green with the introduction of plants, foliage and living walls.

Reading Time : 4 mins

It could be said that we explore colour throughout our daily lives. Living with and through colour affects all that we are as individuals. 

Our personalities, our mood, our thoughts, what we eat, how we feel, our choices and sometimes our desires. Colour creates memories, ideas, perceptions, it plays with light, pattern, shape and form.

Reading Time: 3.5 minutes

How did you get to work today? If it involved an over-crowded train or standing on a crammed bus, this could be having a detrimental effect on your health.

Karen Haller FRSA is a leading international authority in the field of behavioural colour and design psychology. Karen specialises in Human-Centred Design and how our relationship with colour, design and nature affects and influences us, as well as how businesses and designers can use it to influence positive behaviour and well-being. She is the author of ‘The Little Book of Colour, How to Use the Power of Colour to Transform Your Life.’

Reading Time: 3 mins 

The surge of interest in well-being and wellness shows no sign of abating. The modern approach adopted by enlightened employers is no longer focused on creating cultures and environments that do no harm, but rather on creating those that foster engagement, improve people’s health, address their stresses and pressures and helps them be more productive.

Reading time: 5 mins

Until recently if you were to describe a green office, it would most likely be the sustainable aspects of the structure. This might incorporate the building’s energy saving features such as lighting and heating, how it is designed to reuse and recycle waste and to reduce water consumption. An increasing body of evidence is now focusing on the wider benefits a sustainable workplace can have on the health and well-being of its occupants. Ways in which the work environment can sustain people as well as place.

Reading time: 6 mins

Part 2: Communal Spaces

In our last blog post we discussed lecture theatres and the need to rethink the spatial design of campuses to provide settings suited to student needs, but also to evolving pedagogy and teaching delivery. But it is not just the constraint caused by lecture theatres that might impact student learning and wellbeing on campus. The topic we turn to today is the design of communal spaces to host a variety of student activities.

Reading time: 6 mins

Part 1: The Lecture Theatre

A university campus is not just a workplace for academic and professional services staff, but also the daily ‘workplace’ for thousands of students. How university buildings are designed has a major impact on how spaces are used, and this in turn can affect the wellbeing, sense of belonging and learning success of students. In this short series of two blog posts, we want to elaborate on the importance of design on student wellbeing, but also look at common spatial settings – the lecture theatre and communal spaces – and ask how those can be designed differently.