Human Well-Being and Design of Office Space. The Impact of Guest Speaking from Business Companies into the Design Studio Activity

Guest speaking from the world of work motivates Master’s Design students and provides them with knowledge, awareness and professional perspective, promoting active learning. Furthermore, students tend to perceive guest speaking as an expert figure, able to bring them in contact with the real world and therefore to have a more concrete and effective experience. Thanks also to distance learning, this year students were able to deal with e-guests who in other situations would not have been able to participate. The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of business companies into the teaching methodology, active collaboration has helped to clarify goals and contents of the design studio. Thanks to these different speeches, students were able to understand the changes that have taken place in the design of work spaces, in order to respond to new needs and behaviours. This stimulated the students to design, making the course objectives clearer and bringing them to a higher level of detail that allowed them to focus better on the needs of contemporary human beings. The importance of the relationship between space and human well-being was supported and confirmed by the guest companies who talked about well-being at work through their experiences and approaches. These companies tackled the issue of work well-being with different gradients and showed students trends, issues relating to this period and their future profession.