News

 

AMA's Guide to Successful Interaction was published on the 1st March. This booklet has been designed to highlight the key importance of interaction spaces in workplace design, and draws on the research findings to emerge from WorkWare CONNECT, a tool launched by AMA in 2009.

 

You can now determine how well your building is performing by using AMA's new Building Assessment and Rapid Diagnostic (BARD). This tool allows you to quickly benchmark your responses against our database by answering 13 simple questions. We will also identify actions  for improvement where your building is under-performing.

 

AMA has recently completed its work on The John Harvard Library, Southwark. The Culture minister Margaret Hodge has described the newly opened facilities as a "stunning exemplar of the sort of practice we would like to see mirrored right across the country of a very welcoming environment, fantastic layout, good facilities for children and great facilities for people to learn"  1st December, 2009, London, Community website SE1

 

A summary of our research on 'Future Health' carried out for CABE  was launched on the 17th November. The summary and the full report are available on the CABE website

 

AMA has recently published AMA-ZED: School design from A-Z. This tool has been designed to help generate ideas about school aspirations and the way in which school buildings and grounds can help to deliver an educational vision. Pupils, teachers, governors, parents, local education officers, PFI teams and designers can all use the A-Z in defining their aspirations for their school and its community.

The booklet can be used as a workshop tool to engage stakeholders in defining what is needed for educational facilities in the whole community, in just one school, or even in a single room. The booklet also works as a creative teaching tool to elicit pupils’ desires and creative solutions for their ideal learning environments.
 

The Buildings and Social Science network met on 12th November in London and heard Chris Spencer (Sheffield University) speak about recent trends in environmental psychology, and Andrew Gemmel discuss BRE methods, tools and approaches to social research. You can visit BASS net to join this group.