B Sanborn champions design research

B. Sanborn is an environmental psychologist and anthropologist who uses design research to make buildings and communities more innovative and usable. With an M.S. in Human Environment Relations (2015) and 12 years of experience in the architecture industry, they now run their own practice, driven by a deep curiosity about how people interact with space. 

Q. What does your work look like day to day?

A. I collaborate with designers, owners, clients, community groups, and nonprofits — anyone focused on the built environment and places for people — and use research to help them make decisions and measure impact. 

That’s a mix of fieldwork, office work and creativity. One morning I might be running a post-occupancy study in a building, watching how people move through the space. The next, I'm sitting with a design team, helping them frame the right questions before construction. 

Buildings are one of the biggest investments we make as a society; they take up space in the world around us, and they last many decades. I help the people creating and using them make the most of that investment.

I also speak to and facilitate workshops with community groups and other organizations to help them identify design needs or build their own research practice. I help people from many backgrounds get comfortable engaging with research as part of their everyday practice rather than as a single report or element of a project. 

Q. What was your master’s thesis about?

A. Working with my advisor, Ying Hua, I studied four coworking spaces through surveys, observations, and user interviews to understand how the space overall, the amenities within it, and the programs offered helped to create new connections in the overall social network of a place. 

The ultimate goal was to demonstrate that coworking spaces, as space types that create new community "nodes," contribute to social capital formation within communities they serve that has benefits beyond the space.