Values

So, being part of a Values Workshop sounds pretty painful to me but it was actually a really positive (uplifting, even) experience! Facilitated by the project managers, Arcadis, and our design team led by Stride Treglown, we put down on paper what mattered to us, as an academic community, and how a new building could facilitate and enhance our work.

As I will write about in posts about Benefits and how we are calculating the success of our project, values are the underlying principles, and are less measurable. For me, they are more important though, as counting things just gives you the price, not the value.

Our core value, unanimously proposed and supported by staff across both Schools is essentially the accessibility of the disciplines to all. Of course, this means physically accessible, which we take extremely seriously as parts of our current buildings are really difficult to navigate. We have considered neuro-diversity too, and have designed the doors into teaching spaces to be at the back of the rooms, and have thought about spaces of different types to suit as wide an audience as possible.

Accessibility for us also includes ensuring that building users can feel part of our academic community, and the common (joint, not uncouth!) intellectual endeavour of learning and research. The building will support how we do this by breaking down some physical barriers between teaching and research where a lot of the time, research is literally done on separate floors of a building from teaching. Abacws has teaching spaces and research-focused spaces on each floor. This includes staff and research student offices so that all students and visitors can see our research groups and in the common areas, will see seminar details and also images from our research.

We also put being friendly and approachable as a central part of how we operate, so that applicants and students, external stakeholders and partners can all engage with what we do, and do that on their own terms. All of our key staff who have roles facing either students or external stakeholders are located in offices on the ground floor- fewer stairs for me!-and we have space for applicant and careers-focused events which will make is as easy as possible for students and visitors.

I’m sure at some point (once we have final designs) there will be a post on how we have put sequences from computer sciences and mathematics into the building, but hopefully this will make all of the building users feel like they are in a space that meaningfully reflects and enhances the academic disciplines.