Make Neutral Day 2025 reflections – part 1

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Make Neutral Day 2025 reflections – part 1
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This is the first of two blogs recapping the discussions, workshops and takeaways from our latest Make Neutral Day – an annual event we dedicate to internal education on sustainability, including the difficult realities of climate change.

Make Neutral Day 2025 started with a daunting proposition: “architecture at the forefront of a polycrisis.” Guest speaker Dr Joe Jack Williams, head of regenerative strategy at Bywater, gave a morning talk on the intersecting challenges facing the built environment, all of which are outgrowths of or contributors to climate change: flooding, overheating, biodiversity erosion, the rise of AI and more.

Interestingly, the ominous elements of Joe Jack’s talk – including what personally keeps him awake at night (populism, war and the lack of affordable housing, for starters) – swiftly gave way to optimism. “The polycrisis is the greatest opportunity of our generation,” he said, noting that architects and other built environment professionals have a chance to help rewrite the script. This starts by “taking abundance where we have it and moving forward” – for example, being generous with our hard-earned knowledge around sustainable practices and sharing it to help equip the industry to build with long-term, people-focused intent.

Ken Shuttleworth kicks off proceedings

People-first design means thinking not just of those who will live and work in our buildings, but also the people manufacturing parts for them and those constructing them. It means getting stuck into the provenance, sourcing and application of materials. It means confronting the consequences of climate change – rising temperatures, increased flooding and extreme weather – and committing to a mindset of longevity, with a focus on renewal, re-use and community impact. Ultimately, it means pushing back against the individual-versus-industry mindset that all too often hampers the built environment.

We engaged in four workshops across the day to explore these themes further, each of which reinforced important words from Joe Jack’s talk:

We’re not alone. That doesn’t absolve us. It should energise us.

Inclusive placemaking

Makers Greg Willis and Joshua Knight opened their workshop on social value with some striking facts: according to UK Government statistics, around 25% of people in the UK currently live with a disability, and the most common impairment types are related to mental health, a rising issue for both adults and children. An understanding of this changing landscape is key if we’re to provide inclusive spaces that support true social sustainability in terms of equity and wellbeing.

We discussed how best-practice design for supporting inclusivity delivers spaces that are not only free from barriers to access or navigation but also actively welcoming to people who might experience these barriers. An example is the Dutch-pioneered Dementia Village approach, which provides custom residential areas for people with and without dementia, including patients, family and caregivers. The villages are masterplanned to accommodate family living and encourage active lifestyles within safe, tranquil, familiar surroundings.

Other examples include the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley, California, which combines universal design with aesthetics in a way that isn’t institutional or cold; and Bristol’s Restful City Map, led by Raquel Meseguer, which lists accessible venues, resting spots and routes across the city, showing that inclusive design isn’t just about spaces themselves but how they’re communicated.

From here, we split into groups and devised a basic access plan for an imaginary office building. The idea was to specify potential access needs among users, identify obstacles they’d likely face and come up with creative solutions for overcoming these. An interesting proposal came from a group that examined social anxiety as an access need.

They discussed the building entrance as a defining moment that could potentially colour someone’s whole experience of the building, particularly if they’re a visitor and not a regular user. For example, being asked to choose between multiple entrances, without a clear hierarchy or sense of purpose delineating them, might spark anxiety about walking into the ‘wrong’ door in front of strangers (and the associated confusion and loss of control that entails).

Some solutions might be designing one entrance as the ‘obvious’ primary one, with a predictable line of sight so the contact point with security/reception is clear; designing in decompression space before the secure line to create a welcoming, non-pressured entrance; and marking secondary entrances with signage that notes their purpose and intended users.

The discussion reflected a bigger takeaway from the workshop, which is that architects often stop once they resolved the question of physical access, but our agency and influence can go much further.

Thermal comfort

An interactive workshop from Harshita Mathur, Make’s in-house sustainability researcher, explored thermal comfort as an interplay of environmental, physiological and psychological factors rather than a fixed metric based on air temperature alone. We began by considering the difference between climate and microclimate, and how the feeling of a space can shift significantly depending on solar gain, air movement, humidity, surrounding surface temperatures, clothing and activity levels.

The session also touched on an early example of comfort testing in the House of Commons, when David Boswell Reid recorded how MPs experienced temperature, air movement and ventilation within the debating chamber. His experiments showed that people in the same room could want very different conditions.

Harshita's graph plotting men vs women

From here, we became the test subjects ourselves, spending ten minutes in a room heated to 28˚C degrees and another ten minutes in one cooled to 16˚C. In each room, we plotted our responses on the Predicted Mean Vote vs Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied scale (PMV vs PPD scale) to see how differently individuals experienced the same conditions. The spread of votes showed that within the same space, comfort varied according to clothing, expectation, personal tolerance and how much control people felt they had over their environment. Interestingly, the results showed a clear gender split, with women’s discomfort skewing cold (40% cold vs 10% hot) and men’s skewing warm (35.6% hot vs 20% cold), suggesting that a single setpoint may appear ‘neutral’ on average while masking very different comfort experiences.

A main takeaway was the role that expectation and agency play in thermal comfort. Past experiences shape our internal benchmarks – what we expect when coming in from the cold versus escaping the heat, for example – as do our perceptions of control we gain from windows, fans, blinds, thermostats, and even the ability to adjust layers or move seats. Naturally ventilated and mixed-mode buildings can bring these factors together, creating an expectation (and therefore a wider tolerance) of variations in temperature and airflow.

Another takeaway was that personal variables are about much more than clothing. Our individual metabolic rate, activity level, stress, mood and sense of control can all affect how we sense heat and cold. The workshop linked this back to energy and carbon: designing to very tight comfort bands can increase heating and cooling demand, while slightly wider adaptive comfort ranges can help reduce operational energy, carbon and cost (provided that health, safety and wellbeing are maintained).

Ultimately, the workshop showed that rather than something to be calculated, comfort is something people experience differently, negotiate constantly and adapt to in real time.

This is the first of two blogs recapping the discussions, workshops and takeaways from our latest Make Neutral Day. Read the second installment here.