2017

How to create a ‘sticky campus’

Giving everyone a space to be creative

Building a more inclusive campus

Co-location – can it improve wellbeing?

HUMAN CENTRED DESIGN: PUTTING PEOPLE AT THE HEART OF INVESTMENT

EDUCATION BY DESIGN

The healthy choiceAs the UK’s largest design consultancy working in the education sector, we bring universities an unparalleled range of services and the ability to mix these services together to create great places to teach, learn and live.

Building surveyingCivil engineering

Landscape architectureMasterplanning

Mechanical engineeringStructural engineeringBREEAM advisors

Maintenance managementInterior design

Whole life costingFlood risk assessmentBuilding conservation

EcologySustainability management

DQI facilitatorsIT design

Lighting design

Heritage archaeologyPlanning, approvals,

environmentAccess consultants

Fire engineeringEnergy planning

Carbon footprint analysisInclusive design

Transport planning

Other ingredients

Structural & civil engineering

Building, maintaining and improving

university buildings

Landscape & geotechnical

Creating sustainable and inspirational outdoor spaces

Architecture & masterplanning

Designing higher education places and spaces with

the future in mind

Building services & surveying

Helping you get the most from your property investments

Caroline Paradise Head of Design Research

Caroline applies knowledge from

other industries to advance design across numerous sectors, including higher education. During her career she’s explored new construction methods through materials science and has applied neurosciences to better understand human responses to the built environment.

Stephen MacLoughlin Associate Director

Stephen is a Chartered Building

Services Engineer with a particular interest in occupant satisfaction and building performance, both predicted and in-use. His work in higher education includes consultancy frameworks for Cambridge University and Imperial College London.

GUEST FEATURE Terry Stocks Director – National Head of Public Sector and Education, F+G

Terry is a chartered structural and civil engineer with extensive experience in modern methods of construction and contracting. With significant client side experience of managing large estates, Terry uses this to great effect in creating service offers to drive value for our clients.

Stephen Clark Associate

Stephen is an associate building services

and chartered engineer in our Glasgow team. He is an Approved Certifier of Design (ACD) with the BRE, a status that provides an assured service, and confirms design compliance with the Building Regulations in terms of energy and fuel consumption.

Alida Bata Senior Architect

Alida has worked on architecture, public realm

and urban design projects of various scales internationally. She has focused on higher education strategy and design, working on international campuses as diverse as Imperial College London and the University of Central Asia.

Luke Baker Associate Architect

Luke is an experienced architect with a

focus on education and mass transit. He’s been working on education projects since 2005, acting as design lead on university projects, including his current work with Bournemouth University developing two of their new faculty buildings.

Kirsty Pesticcio Architect

With qualifications in architecture and town

planning, Kirsty has worked on everything from masterplanning to design concept development. She is currently building an expansive education portfolio including universities, SEN facilities, secondary and primary schools.

Neil McLean Architectural Team Leader

Neil leads the architects in our

Glasgow office and has over ten years’ experience working with higher education clients to design and deliver world class buildings. With a passion for science, Neil specialises in the design of research facilities which are helping to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

Helen Groves Associate Director

Helen is a highly experienced architect who

leads our education team in the South West of England and Wales. Helen is passionate about the importance of well-designed education buildings, she works with our clients to develop successful briefs which create exciting and engaging learning spaces.

Helen Newman Associate Architect

Helen’s career has seen her deliver a number of

significant projects for clients across the higher education sector. With 13 years’ experience, she enjoys working with and presenting to the full stakeholder mix, be it English Heritage and conservation officers to funding bodies and decision makers.

Note from the editor

Featuring

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since we published our first Education by Design magazine. It feels like the pace of change in higher education has gotten even quicker since we were at AUDE last year. From Brexit to increased worries about mental health issues on campus, it’s even more important now for our universities to be able to face the future with confidence, with estates that can attract the best students and staff, and buildings that actively improve their health wellbeing once they’re there.

In this edition of Education by Design we’ve gathered together more thoughts and opinions from our ever growing team of higher education experts. From ‘sticky campuses’ to collaborative spaces, supportive environments to community engagement, we’ve touched on some of the topics that are shaping the higher education sector today.

This continues to be an exciting time in the evolution of higher education, and we hope we’ve captured more of the industry ‘game changers’ in the articles in this issue. If you have any comments on the articles please do get in touch, I’d love to hear from you.

Philip Watson Design Director

@PhilipWatson15Philip.Watson@atkinsglobal.com

Neil Mclean Architectural Team Leader

will have a positive impact on the wellbeing of everyone at Easter Bush campus. Most importantly, it will give students access to the on campus support they previously lacked. With the university seeing a 75% jump in students accessing counselling services between 2011-12 and 2014-15, making these easy to access on campus will be a huge benefit.

Shelagh Green at Edinburgh University said: “In a global, sector-leading university, students must be at the heart of what we do. This project supports our world-class teaching and research to be mirrored by a world-class student experience supported by world-class services. It facilitates access to central services that support student development, wellbeing and success, both inside and outside the classroom, enabling our student to flourish."

For all students, going into higher education offers both challenges and opportunities. The task for universities is to help students capitalise on the positive mental health benefits of higher education while identifying and providing appropriate support to those who are more vulnerable to its pressures. Providing students with the support they need to fulfil their potential is not only in the interest of the institution, but also in the interest of society as a whole. With mental health issues on the rise, the importance of creating inclusive, social, and supported campus environments, like Edinburgh’s Easter Bush campus, are greater than ever.

Shelagh said: "The integrated design based on hub and spoke delivery enables students at Easter Bush to benefit from the high

quality expertise available at other campus sites. This approach affords the flexibility to anticipate and respond to the student need through ‘pop-up’ provision and the provision of frontline expertise on key aspects of the student experience mapped to the academic life-cycle. Working across structural boundaries, it puts the student at the heart.”

Shelagh Green at Edinburgh University

“ In a global,sector-leading university, students must be at the heart of what we do.”

University campuses are intended as social places, yet too often the experience is highly isolating. Moving away from home, and the securities of that environment, means that students are often left without a safety blanket, especially if they begin to struggle. This experience can lead to decreased wellbeing, and eventually to students spending less time on campus as they search out the social interaction, experiences and support they need elsewhere.

Campuses located outside of the town centre can further compound this issue, especially if those seeking out support from student services have nowhere close by at their time of need.

This was the situation that Edinburgh University found themselves in a few years ago on their Easter Bush campus, located to the south of Edinburgh. The university took the decision in 2007 to co-locate all vet teaching to this location, merging with the Roslin Institute and forging a strategic partnership with BBSRC, with an aim to deliver a European Centre of excellence in animal sciences and food security.

They developed an ambitious investment plan and 20 year masterplan to achieve this vision, and set about developing and delivering key advance buildings such as the new Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies (2010) and the new Roslin Institute (2011).

At first the campus was well served by the café spaces in these two key buildings. However as the campus began to grow, there was a distinct lack of other shared social facilities or student support for the campus, which was seen as key to its development beyond 2013. To this end the university looked to commission the Centre Building Hub.

Designed by Atkins, this new building provides a core where people can mix socially and intellectually, and a gathering space allowing meeting, sharing and interaction from across the campus and beyond. This will fundamentally improve the experience, and in turn the wellbeing, of the current and future users of the expanding campus, encouraging them to stay on campus longer.

The inclusion of a gym, cycle changing, shop, social, student services and multi faith space, as well as a science outreach centre,

The inclusive, social and supportive campus

The role of universities as service providers and stimulators of community and social empowerment is a powerful thought, and a powerful catalyst for change. As a place of research and studies, universities are ideally positioned to enact change, but it begs the question: How can this be done most effectively?

Talking tacticsOne answer could be to adopt a tactical strategy, a community focused scrummage so to speak, which seeks to bind its participants in a common goal – access to health and wellbeing for all. In adopting this strategy, universities would need to reach out and touch their communities, provide a period of pause to truly inspect, listen and take stock of their communities’ needs, and only then formulate a plan to engage.

At the University of South Wales (USW) this strategy is fully understood, and central to their ethos. The university’s message is a societal one, concerning itself with not only how to continue to deliver reputable academic courses, but with the ideals of social inclusion and how the university can tackle it head on in its own community. USW actively ask and address the questions of ‘How do we contribute to society?’ and ‘How can we make a difference to people’s lives?’. Since the opening of USW’s Sports Park in 2006, partnerships with external bodies have been strengthened and new ones

forged, resulting in significant new routes for the university and the wider community. Students are now able to contribute and add value with their knowledge base and enthusiasm, by working with Health Boards and engaging in exercise referral programmes amongst many other ventures.

USW is now among the UK leaders in sport and exercise science research, and students are taught by lecturers who are at the forefront of their field. Their facilities are regularly used by international professional teams, such as the Wales national football team and Cardiff City Football Club, as well as the touring New Zealand, South Africa and Australia rugby squads.

Sports Park IIWishing to reinforce and strengthen its reputation, identity, community offering and teaching, USW have started to realise its ambition to construct a state of the art, UK university first, full size covered 4G training pitch and academic building - ‘Sports Park II’. Designed by Atkins, this hybrid facility adds to an existing building stock of sporting facilities at the USW Sports Park, evolving it into a concentrated and intimate campus of individuals with a shared purpose.

The sports pitch is covered by a white semi translucent toughened PVC impregnated polyester fabric membrane, tensioned over a steel structure. This PVC fabric offers a diffused natural light, limiting the need for the artificial lighting throughout the day. In doing so we are reinforcing the feeling of an open and boundless playing environment.

As well as the 100 x 66m sought after pitch, Sports Park II will provide a double height strength and conditioning lab, a suite of clean and muddy changing rooms, treatment rooms and open plan staff offices. It will also provide high quality teaching space for the university’s School of Health, Sport and Professional Practice.

The key focus for the Sports Park II design was to develop an immersive experience for all. Set within the sporting grounds itself, students can both see and hear sporting activity all around them. Internally, strong visual connections have been set up throughout the building, ensuring users are always engaged with both academic and sporting activities. I fully believe that the surroundings we put ourselves in inspire us, and Sports Park II goes a long way to ensure that this environment is an inspiration to everyone who visits it.

Sports Park II will put USW onto the world stage, offering an all year round facility for club level, regional, national and international football and rugby teams. Significantly, it will benefit all end users equally, with each group taken into account in its design and purpose.

This is not a facility just for academia, nor professional teams or community partners – this is a facility for all. The real value of Sports Park II will be its ability to provide an inspiring, health and wellbeing focused environment for all end users.

Kirsty Pesticcio Architect

A community scrummage

This idea of bringing students from every discipline together also has a ‘real world’ benefit as once they leave university they’ll likely find themselves working in teams, and, as is often the case with large built environment projects, in multi-disciplinary teams. Wolverhampton’s new School of Architecture and the Built Environment will break down the physical and visual barriers between all the built environment disciplines to develop a strong ethos of group working, peer support, greater networking and collaboration. All essential for promoting better wellbeing amongst students.

Nazaria Karodia from the University of Wolverhampton said: “The School of Architecture and the Built Environment gives us the opportunity to see how the design of a space can create big changes in people’s habits. Our hope is that Atkins’ design will help students think differently about their course work and staff think more creatively about how they teach. One of the things I’m most interested in is how we can create a better sense of belonging for students and staff in the new building. The spaces we’re creating are designed 100% with end users in mind, so will offer valuable insight into how people react differently when they feel a space ‘belongs’ to them, using it in different ways and hopefully, really making the most of it.”

A creative space for everyone

Helen NewmanAssociate Architect

When you look back at your university experience, how much of what you remember took place in a lecture hall? Often our best and most lasting memories of university are of what happened outside the classroom – when we were meeting new people, making friends and creating things we never thought possible with our hands and minds.

The new School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Wolverhampton aims to create these kinds of inspirational places for students to work and study – all on a shared campus devoted to the promotion of excellence in the built environment. The spaces have been designed to support students achieving more through collaboration, a concept the university hopes will inspire and reinforce health and wellbeing.

Key to this will be encouraging students’ curiosity and innovative thinking by breaking down the traditional barriers between academic and practical learning. Half of the new school will be allocated to standard, digitally-enabled teaching facilities, with the other half dedicated to studio and testing facilities where students can learn by doing. Visual connections into these practical learning spaces will allow students to watch other students, from other disciplines, as they create and innovate in various labs and studios. Some spaces, for example the architectural model making and 3D printing studios, are co-located, encouraging engineering students to rub shoulders with architectural students and inspire each other with new ideas and ways of working. Cutting edge, shared digital facilities like these will be a key enabler to encouraging students to come up with and test new ideas.

The focal point of these shared studio spaces will be a dramatic, double height laboratory hub and testing space that includes a gantry crane for large scale construction and structural testing projects. This will be overlooked by mezzanines and circulation spaces so that students and visitors can watch as these gigantic projects come together.

Our hope is that this will create the ‘wow’ factor that will help the university attract new students and staff.

Overall, our design intent has been to make visible the benefits of studio based, creative working environments. This includes the creation of dramatic, top lit design studios and flexible open plan studios overlooking adjacent shared and connecting spaces. Through these, the university hopes to encourage the supportive peer-to-peer culture common in architecture schools.

“Our hope is that Atkins’ design will help students think differently about their course work and staff think more creatively about how they teach.” Professor Nazira Karodia, University of Wolverhampton

The multi-disciplinary workshops and ‘super studios’ we’ve created will be available to everyone, not just design students. Our aim is to encourage the typical civil engineering student, who might have previously gone to his/her lecture then straight home, to stay at the school after their lecture and work in the joint lab spaces. Like architectural students, we’ll give provide them a ‘base’ on campus, extending the amount of time they spend there and allowing them to benefit from a highly positive, creative and supportive environment.

AND I REMEMBER

AND I LEARN

AND I FORGET

– BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Stephen ClarkAssociate

The most energy efficient built environment we can provide as designers is a building with no occupants. If there are no students, there’s no need for ventilation to reduce the CO2 levels, no need to consider high daylight factors with addressable dimmable lights, no need to ensure that the thermal strategy can maintain a suitably clement classroom. As designers we can never look at a building on its own; we have to consider the human element. Our job is to take on the balancing act of satisfying low energy requirements while always keeping in mind the health and wellbeing of building occupants.

In higher education there are some big facts we need to take into consideration. According to Universities UK, in 2015-16 there were 2.28 million students studying at UK higher education institutions and of those, 80% of the buildings that they studied in were built before the 2010 Energy Regulations were brought into place. So a large proportion of our 2.28 million students are learning in an environment that will be largely energy inefficient by today’s standards. Another fact is that 46% of the UK’s total carbon output is from buildings. In order for the UK to achieve the promise of reducing 80% of its greenhouse gasses by 2050, we’ll need to be able to ensure our existing university estates are refurbished in a focussed and pragmatic manner, whilst not forgetting or side lining the occupant’s health and wellbeing needs.

To address the crucial balancing act between lower energy needs and a higher quality built environment, we’ve developed an innovative Refurbishment Assessment Tool. This tool has been designed to evaluate the potential health of existing building stock, helping universities to understand the suitability of performing key building upgrades. A real focus is on the passive elements of the design

that also exploit the usability of the space, promoting the need for healthier daylighting and improved ventilation. The tool also looks at the inclusion of Low or Zero Carbon (LZC) technology and how it impacts on the building’s form (site suitability and orientation, for example).

The tool weighs each of the six critical factors shown right in this diagram to score a building’s suitability for both energy efficiency and health and wellbeing. It also goes one step further by offering comparable figures from other buildings, giving universities with a large building stock the ability to evaluate their existing buildings and identify the key ones to refurbish – maximising their return on investment in terms of energy and user health.

Delivering successful refurbishment projects requires much more than state of the art technology, quality control processes and delivery mechanisms. Refurbishment projects require top quality people with experience, knowledge and the technical skills to respond. Our Refurbishment Assessment Tool gives universities the confidence to react and make the decisions they need to make to move the project forward.

Efficiency - it's not just about the building

Psychological

When it comes to consumer products, the days of ‘one size fits all’ are long gone. Now, we’re used to companies offering us a seemingly infinite number of choices, all intended to excite and delight us as customers.

With universities becoming more and more customer-focused, what’s the impact on how they design their estates and new buildings? Campuses are having to improve their offer to meet the increasingly demanding expectations of fee-paying students, academic staff and grant-awarding bodies.

Industries like car manufacturing and consumer electronics have sophisticated ways of measuring their customers’ wants and needs. But when it comes to architecture and the built environment, how do we know what our customers really want?

It is accepted wisdom that great, new spaces can be inspirational and promote wellbeing and mindfulness. But how long does the effect persist, particularly when other factors - such as imminent exams - drive behaviours and perceptions. What will have a real and lasting impact on wellbeing and, more importantly, can we codify it so that we can mass produce it, reliably and efficiently, across the higher education sector?

At Atkins, we’ve taken Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) seriously for some time. The award-winning Law School at Northumbria University is an example of how we engaged users to find out ‘how it was for them’. These exercises have given us a wealth of data to better understand how the spaces we design have an impact on occupant satisfaction and performance. We’re now on a mission to transform this data into information that can be embedded into our digital design tools. The world of BIM facilitate this, but we also need design tools that connect this information to our design outputs.

With our development of a suite of tools as part of Atkins’ WellBriefing service, we bring together in-depth stakeholder engagement and specialist design expertise to early stage design decision-making.

Our bespoke digital design software brings together a range of high level analyses - typically undertaken at a later stage in the design process, at a fraction of the cost, and includes:

• Daylight access for building massing – quickly analyses options and their impact on the internal environment by façade or floor level

• Solar access for open spaces/public realm – to assess the impact on thermal and visual comfort of external spaces

• External views from the inside of buildings (known to promote wellbeing)

Maximising the opportunity provided by advances in computational design and analytics, WellBriefing allows our design teams to assess conceptual design strategies and evaluate the optimum balance between potential energy use, cost and the wellbeing of building users.

In this way the client can be given better advice through an integrated design development process from the very beginning of the project and is able to commission the final building to reflect their specific ambitions and end-user needs.

This same approach is being adopted for digital design tools to model the acoustic environment and air quality. What’s more, these approaches are already being used on live projects, including the £250m Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College redevelopment.

Combined with drive and vision from clients and designers, the dream of efficiently designing people-centred buildings that perform predictably and reliably through the intelligent application of digital design tools is now within reach.

Stephen MacLoughlin Associate Director

Caroline Paradise Head of Design Research

www.wellbriefing.com

Wellbriefing uses an interactive web-based survey to engage with a broad spectrum of building users and commissioning teams to establish their specific priorities relating to wellbeing. The data collected forms a set of Wellbriefing indicators and is used by our inter-disciplinary design teams to make informed and timely decisions that promote and embody the values of health and wellbeing. This encompasses everything from building layout and plan organisation through to environmental design solutions, materials and specification of systems.

Predictable and reliable performance – from dream to reality

So what does this mean for us as architects and designers when designing university facilities? When creating spaces which can become the stage for the best student experience, the ‘living’ part is inextricably intertwined with the ‘learning’ part. Universities realise that the best facilities no longer encompass just lecture rooms, labs and teaching spaces, but rather the interstitial spaces which provide a framework of emotional support. It is no longer possible to separate the academic facilities from those more informal elements which become the backdrop for learning.

More and more universities are investing in student centres, a concept which did not exist for the previous generation of students. As student wellbeing is now writ large in the awareness of universities, these facilities are providing the benefit of creating flexibility and variety for students’ individual needs. As our WellBriefing tool is showcasing time and again, this attention to individuality really does matter to students.

At Bournemouth University, a client for which we are designing two new Gateway faculty buildings, we have integrated the spirit of their recently opened Student Centre. Full to capacity from day one, this building wasn’t even on the radar five years ago – they did not know that they needed it. What does it provide physically? Simply a range of comfortable environments to accommodate a whole range of seating for relaxation, social interaction, group learning, eating or study.

Student centres often become the heart of the campus – the void that completes the solid. They are the infill to student life: a place to go to in between the more formal aspects of studying. And whilst these spaces do welcome formal study, you are more likely to find a student lounging on a sofa with a laptop and headphones or a group discussing a project informally over a mocha latte. Facilitated by technology, these spaces are becoming more and more important to the university’s ethos. These are the living rooms of universities: a space in between the student residences and the teaching rooms. They succeed in parallel to university libraries, rather than instead of them: they are mutually intertwined and compatible.

The main difference is one of formality and privacy, as students still clamour for the printed resources and private carrels of a library on the run up to exam time, but prefer the comfort and informality of a social learning study centre the rest of the time.

Another interesting tangent to this approach is the value that universities are placing on external landscape areas: widening the viewpoint from just buildings to the spaces between them. Whether this is to create gathering areas such as amphitheatres, informal seating in a protected microclimate, or just attractive soft landscaping, universities are investing in the areas which, in essence, tie the identity of the campus together.

The idea of creating campuses where students want to be and buildings that are attractive enough to make students ‘stick’ around, is changing not only how we design, but fundamentally shaping how students will experience university. This is an exciting prospect and one I personally look forward to seeing on more and more university projects.

Helen GrovesAssociate Director

Creating a sticky campusSticky campus. This phrase, originating from Australia and New Zealand, has now become useful in the UK as an explanation for why we need to develop a wider identity in campuses. The requirement has grown because of the voice of the student as consumer: students have been empowered by their purchasing power when selecting universities, and are choosing places which appeal aesthetically as well as academically.

#1 Bournemouth University

We are currently working on a portfolio of projects, including a new £22m landmark building for two of the University’s internationally renowned faculties – the Faculty of Media and Communication and the Faculty of Science and Technology. The Gateway Building will house state of the art facilities on a series of tiered floors, including film studios, motion capture suites and animation studios.

We’re also leading the design of a £40m academic building which will provide a new home for the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences. The project includes the development of a wider masterplan, with landscaping, infrastructure and facilities management.

#2 University of Edinburgh – Easter Bush CampusOur design for the University of Edinburgh’s innovation centre and campus hub will create specialist research facilities for use by the University and external organisations.

#3 Northumbria University – City Campus East

We created a new landmark for Northumbria University with this award winning design for a new School of Law, Business and Design.

#4 University of Wolverhampton – School of Architecture and the Built Environment We’re transforming the site of a former brewery into a centre of excellence for the Built Environment.

#5 University of Glasgow – Health and Social SciencesWe’re using our Wellbriefing tool to create the healthiest environment for students, researchers, staff and visitors.

#6 University of St AndrewsA new library storage facility, located on the site of the former Guardbridge paper mill including with two former industrial buildings also being converted.

#7 University of South WalesNew indoor rugby training provision for the University of South Wales, consisting of covered 3G pitch, classrooms, strength and conditioning facilities and associated changing rooms.

#1

#2 #3

#4 #5

#6 #7

SHOWCASE

So university buildings aren’t just buildings anymore. They’re a promotional device, a way of demonstrating ‘we invest in our staff’. The new building on campus needs to perform all the tasks of Hercules, while also being very flexible and very academically specific. And what’s more, it needs to somehow reduce the financial burden on the university, not exacerbate it.

One way we can create iconic buildings without creating too big of a burden on an estate’s budget is through utilisation. A smaller, newer building should be significantly less expensive than a dispersed, aging estate. Unfortunately, utilisation in universities is traditionally low. This is due to high levels of space ownership, the requirement for course specific specialist space or simply the desire to create a separate identity for each faculty. The feeling of ‘you are now in the (engineering/law/business/etc) department’ is something students and staff will often say is important to them.

Bournemouth University is one university looking at this and trying to create the right balance between identity and utilisation, education and research, and quality of space.

One of the new, state-of-the-art facilities we are designing with the university will bring together two of its most prestigious faculties – the Faculty of Media and Communication and the Faculty of Science and Technology – and the technical areas that each of them use. These two faculties are seen to have untapped synergies, and so there’s potentially a huge utilisation benefit to co-locating them.

The technical areas for the Media and Communication faculty include a sound stage, black box TV studio with full control galleries, ‘pebble mill’ type TV studio, screening room, edit suites including Foley and dub, dedicated green screen and computer animation labs. The Science and Technology areas include a full sound recording studio with multiple interconnecting studio facilities including Dolby, live rooms, isolation booths, control rooms and mix rooms, critical listening rooms and specialist computer labs.

The technical areas of both faculties have a clear leaning towards the media and creative industries. It is highly likely that these two faculties, and the students and staff using these technical areas, will have skills that are needed within the same industries. So creating a new building that brings them together has clear benefits not only for space utilisation, but for collaboration and innovation.

Spaces like this that bring people together, and provide higher levels of connectivity and interaction have been proven to improve people’s wellbeing. Staff however do not always see it that way, preferring their own, separate spaces. To help Bournemouth engage their staff in the idea of shared spaces, we used WellBriefing, an innovative engagement tool that helps people understand and prioritise the aspects of the built environment that improve their health and wellbeing.

Tim McIntyre-Bhatty, deputy vice chancellor at Bournemouth University, said:“Using WellBriefing has taken us away from the basic dialogue we often have with staff

around closed and open spaces. Instead we’re having a more mature dialogue around mixed use, flexible spaces for different purposes. Because of this I think we’ll end up with a building that provides flexible, more holistic environments for the different types of work that people do at different times of the day.”

“Using WellBriefing has taken us away from the basic dialogue we often have with staff around closed and open spaces.” Tim McIntyre-Bhatty, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Bournemouth University

By engaging with staff in a different way and helping them understand how co-location could actually improve their wellbeing, we’ve helped Bournemouth create a building that not only improves utilisation, but increases collaboration and innovation. By creating a stunning space where staff can bounce ideas off each other and work on joint projects, we’ll also hopefully create an environment that helps the university retain and attract the very best staff.

A space to call my ownStaff attraction and retention has always been a worry for universities. With only a limited number of brilliant researchers and lecturers out there, universities can’t afford to lose good people because of outdated facilities and lacklustre estates.

Luke BakerAssociate Architect

Richmond Education and Enterprise Campus

Alida Bata Senior Architect

How we move knowledge from person to person, business to business and machine to machine is revolutionising not only our economy, but our universities and how we design them. Knowledge can no longer be created and kept in a single faculty. Sharing, translating and combining that knowledge with other disciplines and businesses is what adds ‘exchange value’, a concept driving today’s knowledge economy.

This knowledge economy is changing the old hierarchy of faculty over campus. Where previously space was divided and distinguished between faculties, it is now often organised into formal and informal spaces. Mixed use, informal and collaborative spaces create hotbeds for efficient knowledge exchange and innovation.

And it’s not just physical spaces that are changing. We’re also facing a virtual revolution where knowledge can be shared through any number of platforms, with multiple interactions occurring simultaneously. Is physical space still relevant in our virtual world? Why should a student go to their campus if they can access almost all of their learning online? Students have more choice now than ever before when it comes to their working habits and methods of communication. In turn, they demand more from their environments and expect them to accommodate both physical and virtual interactions. Physical spaces must now provide the same ease of exchange, ability to switch between work/live/play, and high levels of engagement as their virtual counterparts.

With monumental changes like these afoot, we as designers face five key challenges when creating the universities of the future.

1. Knowledge is exchanged both inside and outside buildingsThe traditional division between building and masterplan are no longer sufficient. Informal spaces thrive between these and are inherently public, inclusive and inviting through their design; they are best placed at junctions, outward facing and mixed-use. Urban scale spaces now perform functions once held in a single building, so to create truly interactive spaces we have to look at what’s outside a building as much as what’s in it. As we bounce between scales, the process of masterplanning and then designing discrete buildings must be rethought so our design responses match the complexity of interactions we now see on campus.

2. A journey is no longer just a means to an end As working methods become more agile, we can’t always assume a student’s destination on campus is his or her lecture theatre. Whereas previously your destination on campus was defined by your schedule, you now choose where you go based on accessibility, convenience, location of your peers and access to ancillary services. We need to design the public realm and exterior of university buildings so they facilitate and guide this journey, creating welcoming and enticing spaces across the campus.

From campus to conversation

3. Proximity without interaction is ineffective Although agile, informal spaces are cost-efficient, it sometimes dilutes the valuable engagement we get when working face to face. When working virtually with your peers on the other side of the world, why bother looking up and engaging with those around you? Informal mixed-use spaces are designed for ‘brushing shoulders’ and ‘chance encounters’, but we can’t expect adjacency alone to provide successful collaboration. We need to design spaces so that they encourage people to work together in pairs or groups, stimulating the kind of high quality interactions that make for real innovation.

4. Visibility is central to exchangeWhat kinds of engagement then can proximity provide? The tacit knowledge we gain through physical interaction and experience can’t be replicated virtually. Understanding other people, organisations and cultures is primarily a visual experience. We need to design spaces so that people can see each other and are encouraged to interact, with open space, central foyers, landings, atriums and walkways guiding people towards a more shared experience.

5. Places need multiple identities As campuses become diverse districts, they will accommodate a wider range of activities and people. People naturally want to be in spaces they are connected to; a preference towards university owned facilities is often expressed. However, in shared spaces, ownership, belonging and responsibility to your environment is often reduced. We need to create spaces which can speak to a diverse group of users, rather than a single faculty or student group.

GUEST FEATURE

The education sector faces uncertain times. Brexit’s implications for overseas and European student numbers are as yet unknown, as is the impact on future UK research programmes. New benchmarking proposals, as part of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), threaten to restrict university student numbers and dictate ability to raise tuition fees.

For primary and secondary education, local authority budgets remain challenging. The Institute for Fiscal Studies forecast a fall of around eight per cent in state school spending per pupil between 2014–15 and 2019–20, due to changes in employment and contract requirements. The ongoing transfer of schools to academy status continues to change the face of secondary provision − read more about academies and estates on page 4.

The quality of the education estate plays a critical and competitive role in today’s culture of higher student expectations, influencing student/staff recruitment and retention. The much-talked-of ‘student experience’ is also affected by the interaction with the built environment. Providers are mindful that well-configured facilities are an investment in students’ educational performance, productivity, and physical and mental health − the stakes are high.

Meanwhile, the digital revolution is changing the way we live, work and learn. A new type of asset has emerged − data − which is used to form more evidence-based decisions. The education sector already uses data to analyse, target and promote better learning outcomes. Education planning, student pathways and league tables are all supported by defined data requirements, and key points of data collection and benchmarking are well-established in a student education life-cycle.

The same rigorous expectation should apply to the education estate − gathering and analysing asset data and aligning the results with the organisation’s educational aims. This digital approach unlocks the potential for a better built environment, where budget allocations can be correctly prioritised in periods of restraint and uncertainty.

Good asset data also protects estates against non-compliance. Boards and committees often don’t fully appreciate the legal and statutory implications of their role in terms of the estate. Health & safety legislation, statutory certification and testing, and duty of care requirements rest with them. The ultimate sanction of non-performance in these areas is prosecution and even imprisonment. Although rare, this severity underlines the importance of evidencing these statutory duties and ensuring the relevant information is available.

The concept of the data-driven education estate aligns with the government’s Digital Built Britain initiative. The Government Construction Strategy 2016 − 2020 sets out the government’s current plan to develop its capability as a construction client and act as an exemplary client across the industry. The strategy promotes an ‘intelligent client’ mindset, with digital approaches to asset management and planning, and offsite construction (see our offsite article on page 10). Schools and universities can benefit hugely from these initiatives, making significant capital and resource savings across the asset life-cycle.

The first step for any estate is to compile a detailed record of its assets − buildings, building components, and critical areas where failure could disrupt teaching delivery, cause closure or result in prosecution. The production of a digital database of assets enables identification of key risks, allocation of risk mitigation budgets, and allocation of funding to improve assets critical to teaching outcomes. Detailed data-sets of asset condition, and their relative priority of importance, facilitates improved planning.

This, in turn, can support delivery of larger-scale projects that enhance the organisation’s education offer.

New asset delivery similarly benefits from a digital approach to specification, delivery and operations. It pays to ‘think of the end at the start’. A clear definition of the expected educational and operational aims for the asset is a base tenet for digital delivery. The BIM process sets a delivery framework providing opportunities that pay dividends across the whole asset life-cycle. A building may have a lifespan of 60 years, and is likely to be in operation for 93 per cent of that time. The BIM methodology ensures the seven per cent making up the design and construction stages deliver benefits that can be experienced over the whole life-cycle.

The results are impressive. Education sector clients implementing these ways of working have benefited from expenditure opportunities of around 20 per cent within existing budgets. These clients now also have demonstrable proof that their estate management is compliant, proportional and proactive.

Faithful+Gould is supporting the government in developing digital initiatives, drafting technical documentation to deliver the approach across central government and local authorities. We are also working with a wide variety of education clients, implementing a digital approach that drives down the cost of asset management and capital project delivery, in support of better front-line outcomes.

The educated estateA data-focused approach pays dividends across the education estate’s whole asset life-cycle.

Terry Stocks Director – National Head of Public Sector and Education,Faithful + Gould

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