In October 2023, Thomas Heatherwick announced his Humanise campaign, to rid the world of boring soulless buildings. It’s fair to say it launched with a fanfare, as well as a book, a three-part Radio 4 documentary, and a drive to sign supporters up to the cause.
It was one of those rare moments when design enters the mainstream media chat, sparking conversations and generating a wide range of media coverage. This ranged from the very positive, to the very not – “‘Dangerously misguided’: the glaring problem with Thomas Heatherwick’s architectural dreamworld,” ran a headline in The Guardian.
At its heart was a problem hiding in plain sight – a “quiet global catastrophe” where dull building design, or “an epidemic of characterlessness” was making people “sick, unhappy and isolated.”
Add in the startling fact that the construction industry produces five times as many carbon emissions as aviation, and the moment was ripe for change. And design was the answer, or at least a big part of the answer, to create buildings that “delight and unite” society.
Two years on, and Abigail Scott Paul is reflecting on what it takes to transform a big idea into practical action.
Hired in April 2024, she has an interesting CV that includes head of press at RIBA, and ten years at the anti-poverty charity, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
“I see my job as, how do we turn the provocation in the book into a strategic campaign for change?” she says.
If the launch was about drawing attention to the issue, which it clearly did very successfully, Scott Paul has spent the past 18 months trying to turn that spark of interest into “a public conversation.”
“I think we have to be realistic,” she says. “It’s going to take time to make this an issue that is going to cut through. And it’s tough, there are a lot of issues in the world. But we have started to build momentum.”
Abigail Scott Paul
The first, and perhaps most critical, task Scott Paul faces is to “position this as an issue of importance, to make it salient.” This has taken two main forms.
Firstly, to make this a discussion about public health, as opposed to “a style debate.”
The campaign commissioned polling from Think Insights which found that 76% of people in the UK think buildings have an impact on their mental health.
Heatherwick Studio has also supported the research of two neuroscientists, Colin Ellard and Cleo Valentine, who have shown how architectural styles, especially those whose forms and shapes are from those found in the natural world, raise people’s stress levels.
The hope is that by talking in public health terms, the Humanise campaign can focus more minds on the issue – which might otherwise feel whimsical in the perma-crisis age we live in – and so drive more interest, and more funding.
Edinburgh Castle re-imagined as part of the UnLandmarks campaign
Scott Paul also wants to create relevance by feeding into very topical discussions to which their anti-bland message can contribute.
“Housing is an issue of public debate in this country, and that’s somewhere we can add value, and a point of view,” she explains.
So ahead of the New Towns Taskforce delivering its report to the UK Government last month, Humanise commissioned its own study of 1,000 people living in England’s post-war new towns, to find out how they felt about their surroundings.
“The previous generations of new towns have left many residents uninspired, disconnected and disheartened by their everyday environments,” Scott Paul wrote in the survey foreword. “Many describe them as ‘boring,’ ‘ugly,’ and ‘run-down’… people want more than just ‘units’: they want homes and places they can feel proud of.”
“The research showed a real gap between the type of buildings people have been served, and what they want for the future,” she says.
“We were able to use that insight to put forward a point of view that we can do better. And we were trying to amplify the public’s voice in a way that hasn’t been done before.”
A linguist by training, Scott Paul and her team have also been thinking about, “how we tell a better story” to engage as many people as possible.
In April last year, they worked with Uncommon Creative Studio on unLandmarks, a series of images which reimagined iconic British buildings like the Tower of London, The Royal Liver Building, and Edinburgh Castle as bland, modern equivalents, “stripped of their soul using AI.”
This summer, they worked with Sheffield-based Peter & Paul and sand artist collective Sand In Your Eye to create Bland Castles, a series of dull and soulless sand castles built in Morecambe Bay. It was a smart idea, executed brilliantly, with an immediacy the media loved.
The Humanise campaign’s Bland Castles in Morecambe Bay. Photo by James Speakman/PA Media Assignments.
“Social campaigns can sometimes be a bit worthy,” Scott Paul says. “I think humour and playfulness make a huge difference to whether somebody sits up and notices something.”
“As a design studio ourselves, you can imagine the bar is quite high, so we have to come up with something special.”
Another part of Scott Paul’s strategy has been to build partnerships with developers, academic institutions, and funders like the US-based Allen Institute, “an independent research institute aimed at unlocking the mysteries of biology.”
“We can’t drive the type of change that we want to drive on our own,” she explains.
That means working not only with those who can support and strengthen the thinking behind the campaign, but also those groups whose decisions will ultimately dictate if change happens, like developers, social housing experts, and town planners.
It also has the added benefit of moving it away from being seen as “Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise.”
“We don’t want to position this as just Thomas’ campaign,” Scott Paul explains. “We need more voices, and voices that may be heard in a different way to a designer’s voice.”
Heatherwick Studio’s Humanise Wall for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. photo by Yongjoon Choi.
The architect’s involvement as the fulcrum of the movement has obvious advantages, but also some drawbacks.
“The platform that Thomas has is going to help us,” Scott Paul says. “But the campaign won’t survive if it’s just Thomas Heatherwick.”
And some of the criticism of the campaign – like The Guardian article mentioned above – has centred on a sort of whataboutery, accusing Heatherwick of not practising what he preaches.
“A sense of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ pervades the whole book, its author seemingly unaware of what his own studio is producing,” the journalist Oliver Wainwright wrote.
Scott Paul makes a comparison with Jamie Oliver’s healthy eating crusade, and thinks the brickbats come with the territory. “I remember Jamie Oliver used to get attacked for the amount of sugar he puts in his recipes when he talked about a sugar tax,” she says. “But I know that design can make a huge difference to people’s lives.”
And she points out, the campaign has evolved from the ideas outlined in Heatherwick’s book. But the campaign has attracted criticism too.
Writing in Dezeen, Owen Hopkins accused Humanise of being “utterly without politics,” a charge Scott Paul refutes, insisting they have “a proper theory of change” and a robust strategy for pursuing it with different stakeholders.
“It’s easy to throw stones from the side,” Scott Paul says. “But the studio is putting its money where its mouth is, and investing in the campaign. They didn’t need to – they could have had a much easier ride.”
The main thing Scott Paul wants people to understand is that making big, systematic change doesn’t happen overnight.
She says the campaign is resonating – the book has been published in the US, China, Brazil, Taiwan, Japan and Colombia. The team has given talks in 17 countries, and last month, Heatherwick unveiled a 90-metre long Humanise Wall as part of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.
“People get this is an issue, but patience is required,” she says. “We always said it’s a 10-year campaign,” she says. “We’re in year two, so there’s a long way to go. Change takes time.”