- About
- People
- Our studios
Our purpose is to create abetter future by designing the world’s best places – places people love
Why Hassell?
Globalisation, climate change, urbanisation, and digitisation present new opportunities and challenges for how welive.
In this fast-changing context, we bring together the best designers and thinkers in aunique collaborative process that results in both beautiful design and measurable value.
We work across architecture, landscape architecture, interior design and urban design - arich multi-disciplinary mix of skills and perspectives that unlocks the economic, social and cultural value of projects.
We combine our creative design expertise with capabilities in strategy, research, technology and experience design, and we regularly collaborate with experts and partners from further afield.
Through our work, we’re trying to build amore inclusive, sustainable future for communities - and create amore socially and ecologically resilient world.
Our clients look to us for more than our design skills. They want us to help them unlock value for their business and their end users – and find ways to better connect people.
Design approach
We believe in the impact of great design. Design that is engaging, enriching, and enduring. Design that adds beauty and value to theworld.
Great design is driven by meaningful ideas explored through research and testing, and achieved through open-minded collaboration.
It deals with complexity. It achieves outcomes that feel both unanticipated and yet obvious. It engages our emotions and sparks new conversations. It shapes our physical world as well as our culture – our lives and experiences.
The world’s best places are always more than the sum of their parts. They go generously beyond the brief to create abetter future.
Strategy
Hassell’s strategy team helps clients and designers develop adeeper understanding of the organisations and people at the heart of our projects. The strategies we develop help our clients make better use of their space, set up for the future and respond to change overtime.
The team brings an open-minded curiosity to their work, uncovering and sharing specific insights – rich data and analytics that boost long-term value for clients.
Our strategists come from backgrounds as varied as psychology, technology, business, architecture, art, and graphic and industrial design.
This diversity allows the team to consider and convey information like design briefs, strategies and design directions analytically, mathematically, spatially, conceptually and visually – to arange of organisations and individuals.
“Great design starts with great strategy, and great strategy starts with people.”
Evodia Alaterou, Hassell Design Strategy Lead
Research
Our in-house research team conducts original research on topics as diverse as why design matters to nurses, what makes campuses relevant to students in the age of digital learning, whether design is afactor in attracting talent and the similarities and differences between incubators, accelerators and co-working spaces.
A team of practical-minded thinkers with plenty of experience in the field, our researchers help design teams and clients understand how trends will affect the spaces we design together, providing early insight into how to future-proof projects.
Our researchers typically work in partnership with universities and industry experts worldwide, and they’ve garnered plenty of recognition and awards for their work over theyears.
View research
Design technology and innovation
Our global design technology and innovation team is focused on how we can harness new and emerging technologies to elevate our design process – and our design outcomes. The powerful tools we use help us create buildings and spaces that are flexible enough to capitalise on the innovations of tomorrow.
Our capabilities include:
- BIM – With more than 150 specialists in Building Information Modelling, we deploy this critical technology on large, complex projects such as Optus Stadium in Perth, Australia, an award-winning venue with abenchmark BIM process recognised at the international Autodesk Conference in2019.
- Virtual reality – VR brings our evolving projects to life for clients and users. On the University of Brighton business school in the UK, we employed it for everything from in-house design development to client presentations to consultation with university staff.
- Computational design – We use computational tools such as parametric models to solve complex geometrical problems - like designing aspiral staircase for the WA Museum Boola Bardip.
Our team is also actively involved in conversations about next-gen thinking in our industry as well as future-focused design competitions like NASA’s 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge.
Experience Masterplanning
Experience masterplanners FreeState have built their reputation working alongside some of the world’s biggest brands - like Google, Sony and Virgin Atlantic.
Today, their practice supports Hassell and their clients across arange of sectors and markets.
FreeState starts with users’ needs, then designs outwards - for students, passengers, employees, visitors or customers. They’re focused on the emotions and needs that shape aworld-class experience masterplan. Their teams use aunique methodology that relies on ethnographic research, human insight and truth, and creativity to ensure brands and organisations attract, engage and retain their audience.
FreeState’s people come from avariety of backgrounds, including design strategy, management consulting, spatial design, place-making, technology and brand. That diversity helps them partner with clients to create user-centric narratives - designed journeys and immersive experiences that connect people with brands, each other and places they’ll never forget.
“What we’ve seen really clearly over the past 20years is ashift into the era of experience. People are increasingly placing value on ‘experiences’ over ‘things’ – and their expectations of those experiences are veryhigh.”
Adam Scott, FreeState Creative Director
VIEW OUR HISTORY
Breathing Space, London Design Festival, London, UK
An overlooked public square in East London becomes aplace of respite during the busy London Design Festival – with real-time London pollution data on display.
Installations and interventions
Footprints, Clockenflap Festival, Hong Kong,China
Futuristic, mirrored box design blends into the landscape to give kids and adults amoment away from the chaos of Hong Kong’s largest music and arts festival.
Installations and interventions
Sensorium, Clerkenwell Design Week, London, UK
We interpret Clerkenwell’s historic pleasure gardens in an immersive installation for Clerkenwell Design Week – ariot of smells, textures, tastes and optic devices.
Sensorium, Clerkenwell Design Week
Sensorium, Clerkenwell Design Week, London, UK
The creative collaboration of architects, urban designers, interior designers and Scandinavian seating designer HÅG offers anew perspective on how people shape design and how design responds to people.
Sensorium, Clerkenwell Design Week
Pause, Melbourne Design Week, Australia
For Melbourne Design Week 2019 we invite the public to surrender phones and digital devices and enter agiant bubble for asolitary moment topause.
Pause, Melbourne Design Week
‘High Rotation’, Museum of Brisbane, Australia
We design an experience for the public to see, hear and feel the sound of Brisbane – abackstage pass to three epic decades of Brisbane’s musicscene.
‘High Rotation’ at Museum of Brisbane
