Our environments have a huge impact on our wellbeing, and we spend a long time in designed environments; however, these are often not designed with impact in-mind. Through this research, I explore how people experience transport spaces, using the case study of London Bridge Station, and how its features play a role in this, to highlight successes and failures. The aim is to apply this to other transport environments, or public environments entirely.

Inspired by Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? and my passion for designing spaces that have a positive impact, I chose to analyse Public Transport Environments - an area that has a large disparity between human (user) needs and its design, despite being a space people frequent regularly.

I collected behaviour ethograms, decibel readings, object (permanent and temporary) checklists, documented lighting conditions, and took auto-ethnographic field notes/made participant observation maps. I then used NLP to analyse the (VAD) sentiment of these behaviours and the Sensorimotor associations to these objects.

I explored the disciplines of Behavioural Science, Neuroscience/Neuroarchitecture, and Urban Design and Architecture. Reviewing literature across these fields highlighted problem areas, gaps in existing research and what success might look light.

Combining these disciplines was important in order to analyse the impact of urban or architectural design on people and establish principles when creating new spaces. Using methods that range across these disciplines was a useful way to ensure this interdisciplinarity and synthesis of perspectives and disciplinary priorities.

Through the literature review, data collection, and analysis, this research project concluded that the components of the London Bridge Station environment do impact the displayed wellbeing of its users. However, this is not a direct impact but rather the result of an accumulation of favourable/unfavourable components and one unfavourable component seems to be able to be compensated for by other more attractive components. Whilst it is important to consider all senses when designing, their value is still anchored in the ability to satisfy the visual sense. Overall, this research underlines the necessity of designing spaces to have a positive impact on user wellbeing by using well-informed data.This project resulted in an architectural portfolio combining data-infographics, data-informed sensory maps, and design principles summarising the findings to aid the evaluation and design of these public environments, and perhaps in the future, others too.