Laurie Aznavoorian
Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Architecture
Biography
Architecturally trained, workplace researcher and educator with extensive experience delivering workplace strategy across Australia, Asia, Europe and the United States, with a specialisation in innovation, strategy and engagement. A skilled facilitator who frequently interacts with executive level leaders and diverse stakeholder groups within organisations to unlock drivers that help individuals and businesses thrive; resulting in narratives and solutions that align people, behaviours, place and technology with business ambitions.
Thesis
Exploring the effectiveness of design features to incite pleasure, satisfaction and motivation in Australian workplaces
Workplace designers contend the spaces they design deliver benefits to organisations and the people who occupy them. This has historically been measured through user self-reporting or criteria relating to the performance of space such as: cost per square meter, quantity of occupants, churn costs, energy consumed, indoor environmental quality and usage patterns. Neither approach offers a clear, objective picture of how space impacts people or whether it delivers the benefits organisation and designers hoped it would when they made design and investment decisions.
My research will investigate the effectiveness of workplace design features that professionals include to elicit the human experiences of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation. It will build on our understanding by supplementing the data used to make design decisions with objective measures collected using biosensing devices. The research aims to identify the best design features for promoting positive experiences, it will investigate the topic through the lens of three human experiences: pleasure, satisfaction and motivation. Concise research questions:
- What are the key design features included in workplaces to incite the human experiences of pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation?
- Do organisations recognise the need to invest in reimagined workplaces that incite the human experiences of pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation?
- What is the users’ level of awareness of the design attributes that are included in the workplace to incite pleasure, satisfaction and motivation and are they having the desired affect?
- Can new mobile EEG technology be used to identify and map human experiences of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation in workplaces?