Integrative Briefing and Mental Wellbeing

/ fionay27 / Leave a comment

Sarah Backhouse has spent 20+ years briefing and evaluating workplace and learning environment projects, focusing on their sociocultural environments as much as their constructed environments. Increasingly, health and wellbeing feature as building project objectives. However, “health and wellbeing” is often a catchall term, interpreted differently across individuals, cultures and professions. This short post explores the nexus between integrative briefing and mental wellbeing.

Mental Wellbeing

Mental wellbeing and mental health are distinct concepts yet frequently conflated. Mental health spans a continuum from mental illness to good mental health, and mental wellbeing spans from languishing to flourishing[i]. This dual continuum model[ii],[iii] explains why mentally healthy people sometimes struggle, and those with mental illness can thrive with environmental support. Promoting mental wellbeing is a positive goal across contexts as it underpins people feeling good and moving towards their full potential; it also has a protective dimension.

Continue reading →

The Bath Brief

/ fionay27 / Leave a comment

Ryan Anderson reflects on the enduring impact and adaptive reuse of Herman Miller’s first manufacturing facility in Bath, England, developed over 40 years ago. Originally a factory and now transformed into a university, the vision for this building was envisaged through a series of key principles outlined as a “Statement of Expectations”. Underpinning The Bath Brief was the aspiration for developments to serve our communities well after their intended use, ensuring the resilience and adaptability of our cities.

You may have heard a lot of talk recently of vacant offices becoming apartments, but can you imagine a 40 year-old factory becoming a university? That’s exactly what happened with Herman Miller’s first manufacturing facility in Bath, England which has recently been awarded three top architecture awards. Its story of adaptive reuse can serve as a blueprint for the development of any commercial structure in the future.

Continue reading →

Spotting white whales and post occupancy evaluations

/ fionay27 / 2 Comments

This year, post occupancy evaluation has become mandatory criteria as part of the New South Wales Board of Architects continuing professional development. Sue Wittenoom reflects on the scarcity of POEs and their value as a tool for learning, measuring impact, and longer-term improvement.

Image: Photo by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash

July is peak whale watching season on the east coast of Australia. Up to 40,000 humpback whales are on the move to warmer breeding grounds after a summer of feeding on krill in Antarctic waters. This year there’s already been a reported sighting of the all-white humpback whale named Migaloo – “white fella” in the language of the First Nations people of Byron Bay where he was first seen in 1991.

One white whale among tens of thousands – it’s no wonder that he makes the news.

Continue reading →

Change from the Outside (Part 2)

/ fionay27 / Leave a comment

In Part 1, Emma Cutting spoke about her journey into Street Gardening which became The Heart Gardening Project – leading into the development of the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor (MPC). Emma is not a horticulturalist, a landscape architect or an ecologist, although through her varied life experiences, has become a natural navigator enabling the gaps between different expertise and specialisations to be addressed in the MPC project. Emma’s guest blog offers inspiration to us all in the enabling of transformational change.

At the beginning of my journey I wasn’t hampered by bureaucracy and politics. With nothing to lose and the strongest belief that I was onto something, I felt perfectly comfortable approaching anyone for advice and support and was able to ask all the questions I needed without worrying whether they were silly or not. I felt that specialists weren’t bogged down by bureaucracy either. Most were more than happy to give me, the “crazy street gardening lady”, some time. Speaking to so many amazing people from various fields of expertise, I was able to put together informed, well-rounded answers to challenging questions.

Continue reading →

Change From the Outside (Part 1)

/ fionay27 / 1 Comment

Thriving in the ‘next economy’ requires designing for all of life, and caring for place, within social and ecological systems (Thakara, 2015). The Heart Gardening Project in Melbourne, Australia is one such example of the creation of ground up initiative for a “leave-things-better economy”. Founder, Emma Cutting, discusses how this community-led street gardening initiative has scaled up to its current focus, the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor, an 8km, community-driven, ecology-centred wildlife corridor for native pollinating insects in central Melbourne.

I first experienced the untapped goldmine of opportunity that is street gardening in 2016, creating and maintaining a tiny garden outside my rental. To me, street gardening is its own type of gardening -different to guerrilla, private and government plantings. This is the mindset and approach we use for all types of green public spaces. I define Street gardening as creating and maintaining a public garden (often by a resident outside their home) combining site awareness, observation and immersion with a particularly determined, caring, generous, positive and community-centred mindset.

Continue reading →

Layering the Built Environment – A Cybernetic Perspective

/ fionay27 / Leave a comment

In March 2023, we visited The School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University in Canberra. Across a day of sharing research, work and ideas, we recognised how aligned cybernetic approaches are to the ideas behind Integrative Briefing. Layering, pace and change, concepts that originated through Frank Duffy’s (DEGW) work and built on by Stewart Brand are useful lenses to explore the built environment as part of a cybernetic system encompassing humans, technology and environment relations. This was observed through the System of a Sound installation which was on display at the school, and a version is also accessible online. In this guest blog, Josh Andres, discusses cybernetics and the System of a Sound installation.

The built environment, with its architectural structures, infrastructures, and embedded technologies, can be framed as a cybernetic system comprising the interdependency between humans, technologies, and the surrounding natural environment in complex ways.

Continue reading →

LLV Life (Part 3): Insights from an inhabitant

/ fionay27 / 1 Comment

Lindfield Learning Village (aka LLV) is a progressive K-12 comprehensive school which opened in Sydney, Australia in 2019. In Part 1, we heard from the perspective of a new Year 5 student to the school. Part 2 gave insights into the process undertaken to create LLV. In this next installment, we hear from the heart of another inhabitant – a citizen, a parent and as well, a teacher.

Image: Lindfield Learning Village Vision & Values cards

When I first read an article about UTS Ku-ring-gai being closed down to open up a new K-12 school, I was intrigued. The article didn’t say much about what the school would be like, but it spiked my interest.  I followed the progression of the new school closely, I would even drive by randomly to see whether the building site would give any indication of when the school would be opening and what it would be like. 

Continue reading →

Discursive sonar: The theory of mapping meaning applied

/ fionay27 / Leave a comment

We met Jane Cherrington in 2021 whilst she was authoring a review on education. Through our conversations we learnt about Jane’s role as a sense maker and navigator in branding and recognised how her approach was core to integrative briefing. We asked Jane to articulate her praxis and here is her response…

Education 5.0. I am no educator. How then to author a review? How do you make sense of a sector, in all its complex plurality as a visitor to its space? Meaning can seem so concrete, powerful, solid on arrival. But stand back, and take a good look across any space – of cultures, sectors, groups – and meaning’s inherent instability is visible, formed as it is through individual and ongoing re-interpretations of words, stories, objects, experiences, actions, all in hot debate. Contested and contesting forms swirling in tides of incoming information; massive, complex oceans of sensory inputs (data) we swim (drown) in minute by minute, hour by hour. When overwhelmed and seeking sense, volume usually equates to form. The ocean is made of ‘this’ say the monitors. Eddying currents of less or more slipping beneath the surface of such collective registry say no, it is also made of ‘that’. Collapsing ‘that’ into ‘this’ is so common, because landing any idea of ‘truth’ of a situation does require anchor into a sufficiently common recognisable framework. A normative narrative curve. But is this acceptable when there is no normal? What hope then for integrity of navigation if truth is instability? Dissonance. Chaos even.

Continue reading →

The Minotaur

/ fionay27 / Leave a comment

Reflecting on ancient Greek myths, Andreas Markides ponders on how the stories of Icarus, Daedulus and the Minotaur continue to exert a hold on us and whether they are metaphors for our current day systems and the constraints in which they impose on our lives.

Image: Pasiphaë (1943) by Jackson Pollock, from Flying Too Close to the Sun : Myths in Art from Classical to Contemporary

For me, one of the most fascinating of myths has been that of the Minotaur, the half-man half-bull creature that lived in the labyrinth. Over the years I would on occasion stop to consider questions about this myth. How could a human mind conceive such a monster? What gave rise to the beast and what is its significance? What is the myth trying to tell us?

Continue reading →

Elevating the human experience – Creating a sense of belonging

/ fionay27 / 1 Comment

Fiona Young started the new year with an experience at the hospital emergency department. Her experience is a direct reflection of the outcomes of the New South Wales Health Elevating the Human Experience initiative which considers patient, family and caregiver experiences through a constellation of seven key enablers foregrounding principles of kindness and compassion.

I’d never been to a hospital emergency room before and based on stories from friends and family it didn’t sound pleasant. Relentlessly long wait times with many other people, in stereotypical, aging hospital spaces.

Continue reading →