New project about enabling the building sector to design enabling spaces

On March 1st, Research[x]Design starts a new research project/knowledge transfer project entitled enable² – enabling the building sector to create enabling spaces. The 3-year project is supported by the KU Leuven Industrial Research (IOF). The project team includes Koen Coomans, Pleuntje Jellema and Peter-Willem Vermeersch, supervised by Ann Heylighen in collaboration with Anja Van den Broeck (Dept. of Work and Organisation Studies).

Good spaces enable: they improve health and well-being, and empower individuals and organisations to achieve their goals. Creating such spaces, however, requires nuanced insight into the diversity of human abilities and conditions, both between individuals and across their lifespan. Therefore Research[x]Designers investigate how space is experienced from diverse perspectives (e.g., ageing, disability, hospitalization), and develop methods that integrate insights into these experiences in design processes. Several methods have been tested and validated with individual clients, architecture firms, and contractors, enabling them to create (more) enabling spaces.

This project seeks to investigate how more end-users can benefit from this approach by targeting key players in different real estate contexts. Gaining a nuanced insight into how these key players work, and how our methods can be tailored to their specific context, will allow to identify leads to introduce our approach in the building sector more strategically.