Campus transformation – tracking effects on user experience

With great foresight by LSE, ZZA has undertaken four serial studies of student perceptions and experience of the School’s dramatic campus evolution. Our research in 2011, 2015, 2019 and 2023 has provided comprehensive profiles of campus influence on student experience, both at each of these stages, and in the context of the era’s notable step changes in culture and prevailing technology. This sequential ‘time series’ data is now distilled to provide a synoptic longitudinal picture  published on LSE Estates’ website.

Driving entrepreneurship – brief for enabling co-working space

Yes, Google started in a garage, but not all successful ventures can or do. Collaboration is key in galvanising new initiatives, and startups need more than a kitchen table to innovate together – if young founders even have one!

Universities are hotbeds of people with ideas, and LSE Generate – founded in 2018, and ranked in the Financial Times 2024’s top six of 125 European Start-up Hubs – helps their members develop and realise them. Currently supporting founders in co-working apace on LSE’s Central London campus, Generate’s next step is to launch a second hub in South-east London.

How aspiring entrepreneurs’ space is scoped and operates can makes a critical difference, and ZZA is working with Generate to make the most of their expansion. Through structured research with venture founders, alumni, students using the hub, and the operational team, we’re forging strategic principles to help galvanise a thriving local eco-system and optimise the next hub’s positive impact for its members.

Wellbeing and Social Health in the Built Environment

Our experience of cities is highly influenced at the micro scale, where conditions enable or frustrate citizens’ wellbeing. Till now, academic and industry focus has majored on physical impacts; far less on the social. Ziona Strelitz’s latest publication addresses this critical dimension. ‘Resilient Urban Environments: Planning for Livable Cities’ (ed. Runming Yao, Chongqing University), incorporating Ziona’s chapter on ‘Wellbeing and Social Health in the Built Environment’ has now been published. Drawing on ZZA’s research in people’s use of buildings and urban spaces, this looks beyond well-recognised factors like thermal quality, addressing influences on ‘wellbeing in use’, including: location, spatial scale, biophilia, ‘active by design’, community and social memory.

 


 


All photos: © ZZA Responsive User Environments