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Hello my name's Libby Burton. I'm Professor of Sustainable Building Design and Wellbeing
at the University of Warwick. I've just been awarded what's called a Dream Fellowship which
sounds fantastic and it is fantastic. It's been awarded by the Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council and it's a new scheme to try and promote creative multi-disciplinary
work that doesn't usually get funded through the normal academic routes. The Dream Fellowship
is really important to me because it's a sign that what I am doing is seen to be important
and valuable and it's given me renewed enthusiasm and energy for my work.
So what is my vision for the Dream Fellowship? My vision is to try and promote a new approach
to the design of the built environment, one that puts people at the centre and uses evidence
in doing so. Let me ask you a question, if you had to choose just one, to be happy or
to be healthy, what would you choose? I bet you'd say you would like to be happy because
most of us only fear being unhealthy because we think it will make us unhappy, but actually
you can be well and unhappy and vice a versa. We know a lot now about what will make us
happy, a lot of research has been carried out in the last ten to twenty years. We know,
for example, that good relationships are central to our happiness, we also know that having
resilience, being able to experience flow in what we are doing, get absorbed in things,
having meaning, is all important to our happiness. But what do we do to actually make sure that
we have greater happiness as a society? Well, my interest is the built environment, the
buildings and spaces that surround us every day. What if we could make that environment
an environment that helped us to be happier -- for example we could have homes designed
with spaces that minimise the friction between members of families. Imagine streets and neighbourhoods
which gave you the privacy you needed, when you needed to retreat from society, but at
the same time allowed us to meet people for the first time, bump into our neighbours and
so on. We could have work places that enable us to concentrate really well and be creative
in the work that we are doing. So over the next two years of my Dream Fellowship I will
be dreaming about these possibilities.
And what am I actually going to do? I think to make any progress in this area we need
to answer three key questions first. The first question is what do we mean by an environment
that helps us to be happier, what objectives would we be pursuing as designers? The second
question, if we know what we are trying to achieve, how do we do the research to find
out what works and what doesn't, what sort of environments, how would we need to design
those environments to help us to be happy? We need to know the best methods to be able
to do that. And the third and last question would be, how do we ensure that that evidence
is actually used in practice? And in terms of what I will be doing every day, there are
all sorts of activities that I'm planning. I want to get people talking and thinking
about what it means to design the built environment for happiness and wellbeing. I want to get
people together and create a network of everyone who is interested in this subject, so for
that I might use a website, I might start to blog and tweet, forms of communication
that I've never really had time to learn about before.
I also want to travel and meet eminent academics across the world who have something they can
teach me in this area and who can contribute to developing it. I want to run workshops
where people from different disciplines can discuss the issues and think about what the
best future directions are and what the best future methodologies are. And it's no good
just talking to the academics, I also need to talk to the practitioners and the policymakers,
to the architects the engineers, the urban designers, the professional bodies that represent
them and also to the health professionals, the public health specialists, the occupational
health therapists, to talk to them about what is needed to change the system so that we
start to have a different approach to designing the built environment.
But we may need to change things more fundamentally, we may need to look at how training and courses
can be developed, to think about design for wellbeing and we may need to offer more incentives
to developers to think about it, so I'm going to explore the idea of introducing an award
system, or kite mark which recognises design for wellbeing in the built environment in
the same way that sustainability kite marks do at the moment. But through all of these
activities I'm hoping that I'll be able to have some answers to the three questions I
mentioned earlier and that might give us the basis to begin to create and adapt environments
that help us to truly flourish as individuals, which is after all what we all want.