Embracing the culture, soul and character of education and social infrastructure projects is a passion. The capacity to listen to clients and reimagine existing assets informs our consultation, briefing, synthesis, and design visioning process, enabling us to create engaging educational and community spaces that are simple, but have deep meaning.

Our commitment to an open process and co-creative journey is essential, building trust and collectively identifying solutions that epitomise the culture and values of the organisations concerned. This in turn helps to realise a lasting social impact which we are committed to measuring.

This approach has enabled Hayball to become custodians of a range of cross-sectorial social infrastructure projects; be it a major mixed-use educational precinct, a library, a STEM Educational Centre of Excellence, sports facility, a performing arts precinct, workplace or hybrid facility, as joint-use precincts become increasingly prevalent.

Emerging from Covid, it’s refreshing to experience the shift away from silos towards precinct projects celebrating partnerships and togetherness. This heightens the likelihood of innovation and positively influences social change. Multiple factors are accelerating this trend, including the need for holistic sustainability, alternative affordability models, the necessity of greater utilisation, desire for wellness, socialisation, and activation.

Precinct projects also benefit from collective funding, attract alternative models of procurement, help to address market delivery pressures, and heighten the likelihood of joint research and social enterprise. It’s a great time to be involved in social infrastructure projects, and innovation is occurring across many hybrid typologies within the education and community sector. These projects positively enrich people’s lives in a number of ways.

Education and community: Designing to create social value

Often recognised as the soul of education campuses where students from all walks of life can come to connect, learn, and socialise; libraries have evolved from being far more than just a place for quiet study. This is, in part, thanks to the flexibility of librarians, who have not only embraced monumental change but also applied a sense of curiosity to elevate the student experience in new and multi-faceted ways. But what sets a ‘good’ and engaging school or university library apart from the rest?

An intuitive design solution that prioritises a client’s vision, values, and user’s needs. It authentically supports people, embraces place, and narrative, ensuring the project outcome is culturally aligned, accessible, inclusive, and aspirational.

It makes you want to learn, return, and share the experience with others and opens doors to new possibilities through a rich array of curated affordances, programs, and associated partnerships. School and university libraries, when designed well, can exist as a campus’ living room. They should be student-centred, comfortable spaces, morphing inside and out and promoting a sense of culture, enquiry, connection and belonging.

They should cater for different modes of study - for different meeting formats, for changing semester demands, and for a host of other social and educational uses and events unique to the organisation.

They should be aesthetically engaging during the day and into the evening and inspire a sense of creativity in students and staff spanning a vast range of cultures, demographics, and generations. Libraries also need to be agile, technologically enabled and continually evolving.

While all these factors might sound like they add up to an incredibly complex design challenge, Hayball’s strategic approach is simple: work collaboratively with the client’s community to understand the needs and experiences required and place these user requirements at the heart of the project to guide its development through rigorous enquiry. Most importantly, we recognise it is not our building, it is our clients’ and their communities.

Custodians of social infrastructure

As specialists in education and community design with a particular focus on the school and tertiary sector, our work has enabled us to understand the importance of allowing strong client and stakeholder relationships to enrich a project from ideation to delivery. Regardless of the scale or perceived ‘complexity’ of a project, this approach achieves a holistic design outcome that values diverse communities of learners, staff, and the broader community. Projects gain ownership and buy-in. It also leads to the realisation of spaces and places that act as catalysts for social good.

Libraries are evidently one project typology we are extremely passionate about at Hayball. We continue to observe the impact that a library designed according to user-informed and socially responsible principles has on promoting student connection, motivation, and productivity.

Our experience in library and campus design has attracted many clients who are seeking to ‘reimagine precincts' far beyond their traditional usages. This is now extending to the reimagining of towns and reinvention of shopping centres.

Our process allows us to deliver a design vision that resonates with the needs and aspirations of an organisation through storytelling and working together to see a vision through from concept to construction to completion. We inspire our clients to reconsider the way they think about a space’s intended usage and character and guide them to consider its maximum social and educational potential. This results in a return brief which often identifies uses not within the original intent, adding value to the process whilst often saving space.

Post-Covid, we’ve noticed that clients are particularly attentive to more strategic, creative, and considered evaluation of their projects. We are seeing the need to do more with less with mixed use, spatial multiplicity, and agility is at the heart of this. Clients are open to ideas and our willingness to constructively challenge conventions.

Spaces such as research centres, discovery labs and social study areas are mixing and enhancing the learning and social experience. Identification of shared space potential also allows our clients to realise greater efficiencies, maximise joint research opportunities, student-staff interaction and wider community collaboration and benefits.

Understanding the culture and specifics of place

When designing to create social value and to enhance the culture of an education space, design teams need to immerse themselves within the community and understand the specifics of place. The ideas we produce should reflect a place's inherent culture, character and a rich understanding of the lived experience and values of its users.

Our ongoing, long-term relationship working with Australian Catholic University (ACU) is a valued opportunity for us to keep innovating and exploring social value-adding design in the tertiary sector.

Our recent design scheme for the upcoming ACU Strathfield STEM Centre of Educational Excellence, which will seek to establish a rooftop Metaverse space with immersive technologies to engage students, staff, and the wider community, is an example of a future-focused design approach that helped the University to secure a significant $45 million grant to produce what will offer a transformational education opportunity in Australia. Uniting schools with tertiary and history with contemporary progression will create a sustainable legacy.

Client collaboration and delivering strategic return briefs

We have enjoyed playing an instrumental role in developing various strategic briefs for major institutions, which we conducted at a larger scale throughout the duration of Covid.

For example, we recently completed the Design Brief for an ambitious new joint-use campus for ACU and Blacktown City Council (BBC) called Warrick Lane. We have led the creation of the functional design brief working with over 100 stakeholders from ACU and the BBC to produce a hybrid typology scenario that currently does not exist globally. This process was underpinned by a national and international 36-project precedent study, with all briefings uniquely hosted virtually during lockdowns.

To tap into innovative design outcomes, our consultations included a ‘day in the life’ workshop where we asked stakeholders to adopt the viewpoints of prospective users and community members from their counterpart organisations.

The ability and willingness to see through the eyes of others is a compelling way to help make partnerships successful. Such processes identified unique opportunities for shared space and the importance of place curation. We also gained a strategic understanding of the community’s needs and priorities from a range of different perspectives, ensuring the design brief not only caters to these, but exceeds them through exploration and innovative thinking.

This experience is now leading to workplace reimagining. At a small scale, we have designed Legacy House which will unite multiple organisations in delivering an innovative model of service which supports Queensland families who have been affected by loss through war.

Co-creation with multiple partners has informed the planning of the design to balance a myriad of needs. Such experiences across the social infrastructure sector continue to highlight the importance of relationships.

A willingness to listen is fundamental to creating architecture for people, with people. We consider how people from all walks of life can enrich a project - from sector specialists to staff and students – whose values, perspectives, and social and cultural contributions play an important role in the design journey. Intergenerational inputs are essential and most enriching.

Reimagining social infrastructure

So, what does the future of designing for social value and capturing the culture of education spaces look like? We have embraced this question with various designs that become a good neighbour, that are architecturally enduring, authentic, and not just following fads or fashion.

Space is agile, welcoming, memorable, contextually connected and enriching. Ambitious placemaking projects are an opportunity to make a true civic difference, with benefits that exceed well beyond the project itself to contributing a local, national, and potentially global influence. It is all about creating legacies and sharing stories through architecture that have been inspired by deep user collaboration and need.

We are all users of space. We all make sense of, and attribute meaning, to the spaces we interact with. By combining our collective experiences, thoughts, and visions, we can conceptualise and deliver transformational placemaking experiences that unite, inspire, and elevate the day-to-day lived experience of people day in and day out, for years to come.

There is no better time to be working in social infrastructure. The sector is open to ideas, reimagining, partnerships, and design.

By Hayball Principal (Education), Graham Legerton

Images: ACU Strathfield campus / Graham Legerton. Supplied.

Branko Miletic

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