The importance of designing and building to feel

Leah Stuart, Director at Civic Engineers, explores the idea of designing our places, spaces and buildings with emotions and feelings front of mind.

Women and girls are three times more likely than men to feel unsafe in parks during the day, and that gets worse after dark, when as many as four out of five women in Britain say that they would feel unsafe walking alone in a park. This is compared to two out of five men.

This is just one of many alarming takeaways from West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s published Safer Parks Guidance. Further research reiterates just how essential it is that we understand the role of emotions when trying to understand what makes girls and women feel unsafe and excluded in our community spaces. 

Regardless of crime statistics, the feelings are enough to result in unfair and unequal access to community spaces. 

The WOW Barn

Earlier in the Summer I was lucky enough to be involved in the amazing Leeds 2023 WOW Barn build, where 300 women and non-binary people came together to raise a barn in 24 hours. The barn then became a joyful venue, hosting events for two weeks, including comedy, dancing and the Women of the World (WOW) festival. 

After an intense period constructing the Douglas Fir frame, what struck me about the WOW Barn was how the positive energy that came together to build it, carried through to the way I felt in the space: warm, energised, comfortable, happy.

The importance of feelings in good place-making

Around the same time I chaired a Common Good event in the WOW Barn titled “Streets for Girls: Creating Safe and Inclusive Spaces”. We discussed how important feelings are in good place-making. 

If you experience positive emotions in a space, you want to hang out there, you’re happy to walk through that park or down that street, you feel friendly towards others in the same space and you go there more often. 

Positive feelings lead to more activity, which inevitably leads to better health, more successful businesses, and greater social cohesion. 

Seeking the win-win

We need to engage with positive emotions earlier in the process of designing our spaces. Often, street design descends into a quagmire of compromise, or design codes can’t possibly deliver everything, so they settle for a mediocre melange, which disappoints or angers stakeholders. Positive engagement, focusing on fulfilling people’s needs, challenges the status quo and looks for ingenious ways to meet them, so that there is more than a reluctant consensus, we are seeking a win-win.

Earlier in the year at UKREiiF’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Pavilion, I met a group of year 10 and 12 students, who had designed a pocket park within their hometown, on the site of a car park. They had talked to different groups of people and made sure that their design responded to these conversations. 

They thought about how older people might feel when faced with groups of teenagers; how parents with small children might feel when they’d been shopping all morning and just wanted to sit down while their child played; and how they might feel spending time in town after school, face-to-face with each other, with good sightlines, shelter from the rain and surrounded by greenery. 

They placed huge importance on climate change and biodiversity: their designs were sincere and impactful. Integrity, safety, joy and comfort were all key emotional outcomes. 

Emotions and transport choices

Extending this to transport, how people feel when cycling is key to whether new infrastructure will be successful and inclusive.

 The National Travel Attitudes survey revealed that 74% of men 43% of women “feel confident when riding a bicycle”.  It follows that a confident and strong male cyclist may not be intimidated by an uphill start through a busy junction, but a less confident woman, or a child may need much greater protection to be able to feel safe enough to make that journey.

I know from cycling around my hometown with my own children, that a frightening cycling experience can be enough to put a novice 12-year-old off altogether. Similarly, an unreliable and cramped train journey can create enough anxiety to push someone into driving instead. Emotions are inextricably linked to all our transport choices, which can have huge implications for our journey to net-zero. 

We must design and build to feel

We’re pleased to be partnering with The Quality of Life Foundation and look forward to continuing to demonstrate our commitment to always designing with the role of emotions and feelings at the forefront of our design process.

Working with the Foundation to address why too many people in this country are living in poor quality, disconnected places, that impact both their mental and physical health, it’s key we design and build to feel.