integrative briefing | Integrative Briefing for Better Design

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.

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Our 7th sounding panel session connected participants from across Australia and the USA to explore how tertiary and workplace learning can lead to new ways of practice and how emerging forms of practice can inform design education.

Although participants trajectories toward integrative briefing practices were diverse, characteristic of many formative experiences were opportunities beyond traditional architectural training and practice. Some participants had worked in other design and creative fields, such as set design, curatorship and exhibition design, exposing them to a range of other types of people, professions and practices. Working with mentors such as Mary Featherston, Frank Duffy, Shirley Dugdale, James Calder and John Worthington featured strongly in helping people learn about briefing in practice.

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