Executive Summary

It is known that the learning environment impacts on the wellbeing of students and staff using it. This is seen through research into the Well Building Standards and through Dr Elena Riva’s report on ‘Improving students’ wellbeing in the teaching and learning environment’.

This project aims to assess the current state of D002, an engineering seminar room, with regards to the room’s effect on the health and wellbeing on the students and staff who use it. The project will be conducted by a student researcher and will be supported by Chloe Agg and Dr Elizabeth Miles. The project would involve the use of focus groups with the engineering students and staff and will investigate:

• The room performance with respect to light, ventilation, wellbeing design standards, etc.
• How classroom users feel the physical environment is linked to a positive learning experience, and their own wellbeing and inclusion.
• What physical measures the users feel the classroom requires to improve the learning environment.
• How students and staff feel the environment relates to the work undertaken in the room.

The results from this experiment would ascertain the potential impact of refurbishments to this space to its wellbeing and inclusion performance and establish a baseline to measure this impact. The intention is to use this research as seed funding to initiate a larger project researching the effect of WELL building standard aligned refurbishments of educational spaces on the wellbeing of the occupants. This in turn would impact the proposed development of the new engineering/STEM building and is applicable for other departments in any renovations.