The Unmeasurable Left Side | University Design Forum Conference Belfast

The Unmeasurable Left Side

A session from AtkinsRéalis at this year’s University Design Forum conference in Belfast articulated an intuition I’ve felt for years but never quite pinned down.

Helen Groves and Gill Smith’s work on estate decision-making draws a distinction between two kinds of data. On the right: floor areas, condition ratings, energy consumption, utilisation, BIM data— measurable, comparable, auditable. On the left: vision, ambition, wellbeing, the quality of encounter, the capacity to produce awe. Harder to collect, harder to defend, but arguably what determines whether a campus actually works.

It mirrors a distinction I’ve long used in briefing: hard brief and soft brief. Hard brief is area, cost, and room count. Soft brief is feeling, mood, aspiration — what it should be like to arrive, to work, to stumble into a conversation that changes something. The soft brief is where a building’s character lives. But there’s an aphorism that explains why it so often loses out: we manage what we measure. The right-hand data gets managed. The left gets mentioned — in vision statements, in award submissions — but rarely defended with the same rigour when decisions get hard. And when data accumulates faster than the capacity to act, the result is analysis paralysis: an ever-more-sophisticated picture of what exists, without the judgement to decide what should.

The session that followed offered a practical answer. Julian Robinson, Director of Estates at LSE, and Ziona Strelitz of ZZA Responsive Environments have spent over a decade conducting systematic face-to-face interviews with LSE students and staff — not just what they use, but how places make them feel, what has changed. Left-side data, carefully gathered, tracked over time, used to show that specific interventions have measurably shifted user perception. My own practice has worked with LSE, including with Julian and Ziona on the campus public realm strategy, and I know how powerful this combination of rigorous qualitative research and committed estates leadership can be. It turns soft brief into evidence.

In a period of severe financial pressure across UK higher education, the temptation to let the right-hand data win entirely is real. The risk is optimising our way to campuses that are efficient and lifeless in equal measure. Less needs to mean less of the wrong things — not less ambition, not less willingness to ask what a university is actually for.

The member session was introduced by Rob Joyce of GRAHAM Group

The second of three reflections on the conference by Rupert Cook, Partner and Trustee of University Design Forum