Episode 17 – Part 2: Opportunities to improve well-being through the built environment with Ian Boyd, Arc Consulting

This transcript is autogenerated and may contain errors. 

Matt Nally  

One of the aspects I wanted to look at was buildings and well being and you talked about it nicely there to bring us into it. The one of the points you made in the future build video I watched was that we’re really bad at building habitats of humans. But yeah, what did you mean by that? I was really interested in terms of like, what are we getting wrong? And then how does the design process help to? Or how can it help to improve that?

Ian Boyd 

So, yeah, I absolutely believe that. And I do think every built environment is a habitat for humans, because we are humans and other places where we live and work and that’s out. And we should be thinking about it that way. And we should be considering what it means to the people, the human beings who are going to occupy those spaces, but development doesn’t. So work with the development team and an architect however, brilliant and enlightened they are, it’s extremely, vanishingly rare for them to think about what it will mean to live or work in that space. And at the other end of that, very often, in actual fact, it’s there an encumbrance, so actually, the perfection of the building, the building would be much better if no one ever lived in it, because it would be perfect and pristine. And there’s that there’s that floating about out there that are gonna, people are just going to mess all this up, I can’t be dealing with that, I’m going to build it. So it’s perfect and beautiful, and highly functioning, and it’s perfected in terms of its being kind of technology, and all of this stuff is gonna work brilliantly, and I’m gonna put a load of people in and they’re just gonna mess it all up, because they won’t understand any of it. So I’m not going to think about that. And that’s where it goes wrong. So volume house building, it’s fast. And it’s inevitable, of course, it’s a business. So but yeah, the people in it are entirely secondary, they have no say in the quality of the building that’s going to go up. And the development usually as long gone by the time they move in, not always if it’s a phase development, they may still be around, eventually, you know, they’re kind of on their own, really. So there’s that traditionally, I would say, and I would certainly be able to provide examples, the design of the places where we live and work has no interest at all, in the quality of life of the people who are inhabiting it. Now it may have to meet minimum standards in terms of the individual unit, the space available to people that the building control rules that we need to think about the air quality, the ventilation, and so on, of course, absolutely video in terms of the design of a of a community of people, either in terms of work or residential, it’s extremely rare to see designed or thought about the common spaces. So I’m going to step out of my home. Let’s think about the gardens for a start. So everyone’s in their own tiny private spaces. And the gardens are often too big and they can’t manage them. And that becomes a frustration. But because the gardens are so big, the public realm is tiny. So shrinking the garden spaces maximising the public realm, for example, we’ve just done on a project with the housing is brilliant, because it means people can manage their space, but they know they walk out the front door into this colossal park that has given them for free, and get the best of both worlds. So we’ve really far too interested in tiny little private domains, boxing and fencing them into that everyone is hermetically sealed in, we meet when we step outside the front door, and we say hello, and then we go on our way. But the public realm given to us is rubbish. It’s almost always awful. And that’s because it’s the leftover bits that weren’t developed. So there’s a whole bunch of rubble and God knows what rolled into it was dark, which makes it quite hard sometimes to landscape it. But that aside, it’s not always an issue, actually, because there’s interest in carbon benefits and doing that kind of stuff. It’s not designed to, to make spaces where you and I might actually have a chat, where I can go for a walk with my dog. And I know it’s going to be a place where I can sit. And there’s a bunch of kids who want to go out and ride their bikes, but just around the corner, don’t do that. And I barely notice them. And I know that they’re and that’s fine. But we’re not trying to fight over the same space. The designs usually leave entirely tokenistic. Ill thought through an entirely disposable public realm. It’s always flat, it’s always green, it’s always got the lowest cost planting, which is the least interesting stuff in it. And we and we churn this stuff out every day. And it makes people ill because we’re fighting over the little bit we’ve got which is awful, and has no purpose and has no meaning and has no value. And so I want to I want to my kids to kick a football on it, but you don’t you don’t want that at all. You want to sit there and read your newspaper. But that’s all we’ve got what we’re going to do. So this is what we’re doing all the time. And what happens is that the consequences and they are severe, it sounds trivial, but it’s not. How many developments are that? Well, almost all of the big ones I can think of generate issues once people move in, around ASB around arguments sometimes flashpoints that lead to murder. It’s rare, but it happens. Now. Can you draw that back to design? I think you probably can, to be honest, I’m not sure I’d be able to make that stand up in court. But we are not thinking this through. We are not making places that are treating the outside space and As the common room, the common room that all of us share that is deliberately designed to provide that multiplicity of functions. That gives me respite, I’ve got a crap day awful, I’m in the house, it is doing my head, and I’m just gonna step outside and go for a walk. And it’s saved me from trauma that day. And I’m talking to someone in a way that I can say, I love it. I just don’t want to talk. But actually, you know what, I’ve had an awful day. And there’s a bench there. There’s a bench every 100 metres I know I can sit down and simple stuff. tonnes of work done in IT people like young gal, I’ve been talking this stuff for years. And the we know what to do. It’s exactly the same as our previous conversation that we know what to do. This is not a mystery. We have got to work out, we know how to design places that keep people healthy. Why aren’t we doing it? Why are we not doing it? And one of the reasons this, that people do not have the same level of compliance demands with the planning system at Wildlands.

Matt Nally  

Okay, is it Yeah, it’s interesting, because I sat there, whilst you were saying that thinking of two different scenarios in my head, that very style environment that you mentioned, which is, you just don’t see anyone around. And it’s one of the items I suppose from a mental health perspective at the moment is, it’s very easy never to smile and say hi to someone, you know, you order stuff from your house, you don’t have to leave home, you go to the checkout at the supermarket itself scan. So you can never speak to someone all day. And then the other extreme in my head was the times where you might go camping, and you’re in a sort of, maybe in a field, for example, camp, you have this communal field, and there’s a they put a fire pit in the middle and everyone you don’t know anyone there but you everyone communities around the around the fire and you have that social element that you lack in, you say in this sort of more sterile environment. And it makes a huge, huge difference. But we’re social beings, I think, I suppose what are the what are the opportunities then there with, with those with those developments, whether it’s, you know, commercial space industry, residential space to? Like, what are the easy changes that can be made on them to make them more engaging, more wildlife friendly, more socially interactive?

Ian Boyd 

Yeah, it’s all about places to dwell, and multifunctionality. So older cohorts need something different to a bunch of teams, young moms need something different to a bunch of professionals who just whenever wander, and with their laptop, or checking their phones, you know, that’s they’re all, they are all valued members of the community, they all deserve to be thought about in the way that a place is designed. You can’t just churn out a flat green square and presume that that will provide any of those because it absolutely won’t, when provide any of those things. It’s that we are going straight from design to maintenance. In that case, we feel that the tokenistic demand to provide some open green space flat is good, because don’t run them over it as small as possible, please. And I’ll put some point the landscaping around it and off I go, and I’ve gone and I’ve done that. And that’s awful. In fact, it’s worse than awful, because what it ends up doing is creating problems that are then the business of underfunded public services to deal with. So I’m bumping those issues that I could have designed out but I didn’t straight onto the NHS straight onto the public health team at my local council. We’ve got no money, got no time. It’s actually awful. It’s terrible. So what do we need to do? We need to provide places to sit benches. Let’s not go to the catalogue and choose yet another same looking metal park bench making sure of course, it has got enough novels and notches on it that no one can actually sleep on it. So instead of going for horrible, generic, bland, meaningless, boring, and hostile furniture, oh, my God, we do that all the time. Let’s go for interesting. Get a big log plane, the top off. Yeah, are still almost nothing. It’s bomb proof and fireproof. And it’s brilliant. Because if a kid’s on a BMX bike, there’ll be on it in a flash, do enough of them. And he or she will be over there. But I still sit on that one over there. And I can see them and we can see me when we’re in the same place. When I chat with you over here. No problem. We’re sharing the same place. We’re enjoying ourselves getting what we need out of that space that we need. And if you can’t get much room, you can still do this by creating interesting typography. This is a problem with flatness. We’ve got a flat earth problem in design and development. Why do we do it? It’s complete because it’s easy to maintain. There is no excuse for boring point. football pitch of course, obviously. Okay, and room to kick a ball about very, very, very important. Good, let’s have that. But where we can let’s make a lumpy, undulating, interesting topography that is full of variety and curiosity that has drive it from a wildlife point of view. Brilliant. And if you combine this point, you can combine human health, your carbon budget and your biodiversity can mines in one simple project, because you don’t cut off. For 5060 70,000 quid you retain the material on site and you build an interesting landfill, you get all the inert stuff from your demolition job and you include that within it, you have a subterranean environment that’s full of holes and voids. Now of course, you either, you need to think about this carefully, you need to build it safely so that you don’t after the first rainfall have all the concrete pointing through, yes, obviously, but that we can do that we now have to do that. But you create a space that has subterranean spaces that will fill up with slow worms. Meanwhile, on the top, there are little kids running about like crazy, because it feels like a fort. Around the corner. I designed integral benches because I’ve designed this brand for I don’t even have to buy a bench because I’ve built it into the landform I’ve made. And suddenly this space, whenever it might be 2030 square metres, is full of life. Because there are different ages doing different things. And there is wildlife and there is variety, and the landscape, and the maintenance of it is potentially slightly more difficult and complicated, because it’s not flat. But honestly, of course we can deal with that, obviously, of course we can. And what about dogs and not being able to see dog maxim that, you know, well, we’ll deal with that we’ll find a solution to that that’s not make these these imaginary hurdles that are real issues in life, but they are not hurdles, let’s not make them stop us doing something brilliant, which is cheap, and incredibly valuable in terms of your ESG returns, for example, because you have used that space so efficiently, you’ve ticked off all those things in this tiny space. And we created an environment that is better for people and wildlife than it was before. Instead of planning it after spending a fortune carting off in terms of money in terms of carbon budget, in terms of remaining wildlife utility, you’ve made it the worst possible space, you could just so you can hand it over to a Mancow in an easy fashion, to Mad absolutely mad to heterogeneity, variety of landform places to sit, imagine outdoor rooms for different cohorts of people, and build that into your thinking. And you can do it in tiny spaces, and you can do it in big spaces,

Matt Nally 

that I can see the benefit of that just from a even a quick smile. Sometimes if you walk past someone having a bad day, as you mentioned, just even they don’t want to smile, you have to do that smile, just to be polite, and it does give you a boost. And you might have a quick hello, and then it turns into a conversation but it’s it changes your, your mindset, then you go back into the house and you feel that much better. And it’s such a small, a small simple thing, both in terms of changing the design of something, but also the interaction from as you say, then a longer term problem that then has to get funded through mental health care, whatever, whatever else it might be. So it’s um, it’s amazing how the chain effect that you mentioned, around these things.

Ian Boyd  

Exactly. I mean, that’s it, Matt really, if you desire if you start thinking about this, and also it’s not finished when it’s built. By doing it in that way, by not fully prescribing it, you know how development works, you feel it you create a D are usually as a condition of detailed landscaping plan that nails down precisely the size of the plants, not just the number. I mean, I’ve written these things, and you know, but actually, you know, the author is going to die. And, you know, it’s going to change for the better or worse, but so we should be building places that are not fully prescribed. Now, of course, we’re going to get through the planning system yet understood. But we should be thinking of places that are going to develop with their community. So leaving spaces unfinished, so that in the process of them being inhabited, we can figure out collectively, whether that’s through a neighbourhood society or Housing Association, or the ownership of that is through an interesting man co version, or a variety, different forms of management that are required. If there’s any innovation required, it’s actually in that not in the design of habitat. Because as I said, even buying off the shelf, you can do a lot more if you if you’re interested in the way that you create extra patents and so on that are both ornament and designed for people but also habitable by very simple plants, encouraging mosses and lichens back into the built environment, or world of interesting stuff to be done. But the real innovation is how am I going to construct the contract the contract model for my development, such that it allows sufficient room for this to evolve and become more interesting and respond to the demands of the people who live there. And in a positive way, so that it isn’t just made. ludicrously neat. Why, from the outset, at which point everyone, some people will moan that it’s no longer needed, well, then we’re already doomed at that point. So let’s create it in an unfinished way to start with and work our way on from there. So I you know, that these are techniques we should be building into the way we think. And also that’s agency. You do that on an industrial park, it means every tenant has a stake in how that space that they like and they want to become better and they can actually have a conversation but what we’re going to do, you know, we’re going to club together and do something interesting with that, but that isn’t finished yet. You know what we’re going to do? doesn’t mean it is going to happen. But it can be facilitated. This can be part of the way that sites are managed, collectively. And it gives us a chance to talk to one another about something we both think is interesting on our doorstep.

Matt Nally  

With that agency perspective, did you then see the people working or living in those environments? take more care of the environment they’re in because for example, I can think of going back to housing, I suppose. But housing, development near us and a few but they were nice. Yeah. Fresh, I suppose is the word that rather nice when you walk through initially when it’s built, but very quickly, it starts to look a bit rundown, there’s just cars parked everywhere, the landscaping is not really well looked after. Does that change when you have these environments where you put these sort of mounds in and the different benches and stuff like that, because people have more care about being in the environment that they’re interested in being in that space? And therefore they look after it? Or?

Ian Boyd  

Yeah, it’s a good question, I think it can. So one of the, of course, one of the tricks is that by not designing it from the outset, so that it’s straight lines, flat surfaces, perfect flowerbeds, and everything is neat, as perfect as it possibly can be, which can only decline, it can’t get any better. It can, we’re back to the purity of the design versus a lived environment, they’re not the same thing. If you create a pure design, and you build it, and then you put people in it, they will mess it up. It’s just that is how it’s going. Because we are, that’s how things work. That’s inevitable. And yet, that then generates the arguments and complaints and the letters. So let’s not even start in that place. Let’s have some formal space. But there’s only one component of the way that we design it. Parking is another really interesting example. How are we going to arrange parking so that we don’t end up with everyone parking on the pavement, because there’s no longer any space, because the garage next door is actually got so many cars that they’re parking in your road. Now, we all know how this happens. Some of it is insoluble, it will happen. So let’s just say it’s going to happen. And think about how we can mitigate or soften some of those inevitable lived experiences of being a human being in a place that’s messy, complicated. And it’s entirely contingent, it’s not pure, not like design. Let’s think about it in that way. And let’s create spaces that have an element of formality that is clearly intentional. I’ve made this space in a minute, the maintenance contract around it is saying well over a two metre strip around this is always going to be mowed. Don’t worry about that, so that you’d be able to see your way into it, it’s not going to creep over the pavement and trip you up or get in the way you buggy. But actually, within that, it’s going to be a chaotic kind of mess of a thing with all sorts of curious features in it, but enough benches and pass through that you’ll be able to safely get to it’s not going to be an impenetrable wilderness. But we start in a place that has enough designed quality to it that I feel comfortable, I don’t feel alienated, I feel welcomed into it. But I have not had these expectations of perfect permanent maintenance imposed upon me by design. I had an old saying. So I think that’s, you know, there will always be arguments, there will always be arguments and part of the psychological shift that is inevitable and has to happen is away from this obsession with everything looking like a a an old fashioned public park, which had a team of 30 Gardens working on it. Now. It’s not yet been exist anymore, but we perpetuate them in in developments, which is the worst possible way of doing it really so. So I think it’s all in the design is setting the expectations in the right way right at the outset. Such that those kinds of consequences don’t arise. And more interesting possibilities do arise to answer your question, sorry, which is that actually, I don’t feel excluded from this. I’m going to take some seeds from this interesting wildlife garden a bit of the site, I’m going to put them in my garden because I’ve seen how many butterflies or I’m going to the man co isn’t a traditional Mankiewicz arranger service, this is happening a lot more now. And they knocked on my door and they said they’ve got an open day next weekend. So I’m gonna go to that because they’ll tell me what their aspirations are for the site. And I’ve got some ideas, I’d like to contribute to that. And suddenly it changes and there’ll be friction and there’ll be arguments, but they will not be these kinds of catastrophic head butting arguments that result in no one ever being happy. There’ll be some kind of consensus building around a shared space that we can all enjoy in different ways because it’s very heterogeneous. It’s diverse in the spaces that officers and men we can all find a space that we feel contented.