Have We Designed Wellbeing Out of Student Life?
UNLOCKED ISSUE 7: MIND & SPACE
Written By: Philippa Charrier
A strange contradiction lies at the heart of modern student life.
We have never paid more attention to student wellbeing. Universities have expanded counselling and mental health services. Accommodation providers run wellbeing programmes, social events and community initiatives. Students have access to apps, helplines, resilience programmes and an entire vocabulary around mental health that barely existed when many of us were at university.
At the same time, we have created a way of living in which many of the ordinary behaviours that help human beings stay well have become surprisingly easy to avoid.
"We have become exceptionally good at engineering friction out of everyday life without asking whether some of that friction was quietly doing us good."
A student can now wake up and attend a lecture online. They can order breakfast, lunch and dinner to their door. They can study, shop, bank, watch television, speak to their family and communicate with friends without leaving their bedroom. For students living in self-contained studios, many of the practical reasons to leave their room have disappeared. Cooking, studying, entertainment, and socialising online can all happen within the same small space.
From a design and technology perspective, it is extraordinarily efficient. From a human perspective, I am not sure it is quite the triumph we imagine.
I have spent more than a decade developing and operating student accommodation, and during that time I have watched student living change enormously. Buildings have become more sophisticated, expectations have risen, and technology has removed countless everyday inconveniences.
Much of this is undoubtedly progress. Nobody wants to return to freezing student houses, unreliable boilers and institutional corridors simply because previous generations survived them.
But I increasingly wonder whether, in our determination to make student life easier, more private and more convenient, we have inadvertently designed out some of the things that helped keep young people well.
The things we used to get for free
While writing Student Thrive Mode, I kept returning to the same basic foundations of human wellbeing: sleep, movement, daylight, nutrition, manageable stress, meaningful social connection, routine and belonging.
None of these is particularly revolutionary. In fact, that is precisely the point.
For most of human history, many of these things did not require a wellbeing strategy because everyday life provided them for us.
We walked because we needed to get somewhere. We went outside because staying all day indoors was rarely practical. We encountered other people because shopping, eating, working and learning repeatedly put us in their path. We had routines because we had to be somewhere at a particular time.
Nobody called a walk to work a movement intervention. Nobody described chatting to someone while preparing dinner as a loneliness strategy. Going outside in the morning wasn't a circadian-health initiative.
It was simply life.
Technology has gradually removed many of those requirements, and our buildings have sometimes followed suit. We have become exceptionally good at engineering friction out of everyday life without asking whether some of that friction was quietly doing us good.
Take the walk across campus. It may appear inefficient compared with watching a lecture from bed, but during that twenty-minute journey a student moves their body, encounters daylight, changes environment and passes other people.
Making dinner in a shared kitchen takes more effort than having food delivered, but it may also spark a five-minute conversation with a flatmate that stretches into twenty minutes around the kitchen table.
Walking to the shops is less convenient than pressing a button on an app, but it requires a student to leave their bedroom and participate, however briefly, in the world outside.
These are tiny interactions, and no individual walk or conversation will transform someone's mental health, but repeated day after day, they form the architecture of a life.
The path of least resistance
Human beings are extraordinarily responsive to their environments, often without realising it. We like to imagine that our behaviour is mostly a product of motivation and willpower, but the spaces around us quietly shape the choices we make every day.
Put the lift directly in front of someone and hide the staircase behind a fire door, and most people will take the lift. Put a comfortable chair beside a window, and people are more likely to sit there. Give a six-person flat a kitchen table with six chairs, and you create the possibility of everyone eating together; give them a breakfast bar with three stools, and you have already made that less likely. Make a communal kitchen somewhere students actually want to spend time, and they are more likely to stay after cooking rather than taking their plate back to their bedroom.
"Belonging is often constructed from extraordinarily ordinary moments."
Design shapes behaviour, often without us noticing it.
That is why I think we need to be careful about the direction student accommodation has taken.
Over recent decades, much of the market has understandably moved towards greater privacy, convenience and self-containment. Students want good-quality bedrooms and a safe, quiet place to retreat to, particularly when they are adjusting to an unfamiliar environment.
But there is an important difference between offering privacy and creating an environment where isolation becomes the path of least resistance. What happens when a student steps outside their bedroom? Where do they naturally encounter other people, and what reasons does the building give them to spend time beyond their own room?
Friendship, after all, rarely begins with a wellbeing initiative. It is far more likely to begin with borrowing some milk, asking a flatmate what they are cooking, walking into university together, or chatting while waiting for the kettle to boil. These small, unplanned interactions are easy to dismiss, but they often shape how familiarity becomes friendship and how a building begins to feel like home.
Belonging is often constructed from extraordinarily ordinary moments.
The mental health conversation needs to move upstream
None of this is an argument that architecture causes mental illness, nor that better buildings can replace counselling, medication or professional mental health support.
Student mental health is complex, individual and serious. Students experiencing difficulties must be able to access appropriate professional help.
The scale of the challenge deserves that seriousness. A House of Commons Library briefing on student mental health cites a Student Minds survey in which 57% of respondents self-reported a mental health issue, and 27% said they had a diagnosed mental health condition.
But acknowledging the importance of treatment should not prevent us from examining the conditions surrounding the problem.
If somebody is sleeping badly, seeing little daylight, moving very little, eating poorly, spending large amounts of time alone and living much of their life through a screen, it seems entirely reasonable to ask whether those conditions might influence how they feel.
And if large numbers of young people are living in environments that make those behaviours easier, perhaps our response cannot only begin once they are struggling.
We need to move some of the conversation upstream.
The latest Student Academic Experience Survey from HEPI and Advance HE provides an interesting reminder that the picture is not uniformly bleak. In 2026, two-thirds of full-time undergraduates said they were happy with their choice of course and institution, and perceptions of value for money reached their highest level in more than a decade.
That is encouraging.
Yet the same research shows how profoundly student life is changing. 65% of full-time undergraduates now undertake paid employment during term time, working an average of nearly 14 hours a week alongside their studies. The traditional idea of the student with endless spare time bears increasingly little resemblance to reality.
This makes the everyday environment even more important.
When students are tired, busy, financially stretched or overwhelmed, we cannot assume they will repeatedly make the healthier choice simply because they know it is good for them. The environment needs to make that choice easier.
What does this building make me likely to do?
Perhaps this gives those of us working in student accommodation a different way of thinking about wellbeing.
Instead of starting with the question, What wellbeing initiatives can we add to this building?, we could start much earlier:
What does living here make a student more likely to do every day?
Does the building make movement easy and natural?
Does it encourage students to encounter daylight?
Are the stairs visible and inviting, or has circulation been designed entirely around convenience?
Do students naturally pass through shared spaces, or must they consciously choose to visit them?
Is there somewhere comfortable to sit for five minutes without needing to book it, organise it or attend an event?
Does the kitchen encourage people to linger?
Can a student retreat when they need privacy without being able to disappear from community life altogether?
Does the bedroom support sleep?
And perhaps most importantly, are there reasons to leave it?
These questions are less glamorous than adding another amenity to a marketing brochure. There is no spectacular CGI rendering of an accidental conversation while somebody makes toast.
But those ordinary moments may ultimately matter more.
The property industry already understands the power of environment to shape behaviour. Retailers think intensely about how customers move through shops. Hotels consider the journey from reception to bedroom. Office designers study circulation, interaction and dwell time. Urban designers think about where people stop, meet and move.
We understand that the physical environment influences what people do.
Why wouldn't we apply the same thinking to the behaviours that support student wellbeing?
Useful friction
Perhaps what we need to reconsider is our relationship with inconvenience.
For decades, innovation has largely meant removing it: faster lifts, food delivery, online lectures, private facilities, streaming entertainment and contactless everything. Fewer reasons to wait, walk, share or leave home.
Many of those innovations are genuinely useful.
But not all friction is bad.
There may be such a thing as useful friction: small amounts of effort built into everyday life that gently prompt us towards behaviours we need.
The stairs that are easier to find than the lift.
The shared kitchen on the route back to a bedroom.
The laundry room that happens to have somewhere to sit.
The entrance that encourages you to walk rather than arrive and disappear.
The communal table positioned where people naturally pass it.
The twenty-minute walk across campus.
None forces anybody to behave in a particular way, nor should it. Good design is not about controlling people; it is about making certain behaviours more likely.
Perhaps that is where the next generation of student wellbeing design needs to go.
Not towards more interventions, more scheduled activities or another room labelled "wellbeing", but towards environments that quietly support the things human beings have always needed: movement, daylight, sleep, nourishment, connection, routine and belonging.
"Perhaps the future of student wellbeing is not another app, initiative or amenity. Perhaps it is a staircase somebody actually wants to take."
These things sound almost too ordinary to matter.
But that may be precisely why we have underestimated them.
For generations, everyday life quietly provided many of the behaviours that help keep human beings well without anybody having to prescribe them. Movement, daylight, routine, social contact and belonging were woven into the fabric of the day.
As life becomes increasingly frictionless, perhaps the challenge for those of us designing the places where students live is not simply to ask what else we can provide.
It is to ask what we may have inadvertently taken away.
Because if we keep designing these ordinary moments out of student life, we should not be surprised when we find ourselves developing increasingly sophisticated ways of putting them back in.
Author Bio & Reference
Philippa Charrier is an author, award-winning architectural and urban designer, keynote speaker and founder of FAT Properties, a student accommodation company that places wellbeing at the heart of its homes. She has spent more than a decade exploring how the environments students live in influence their behaviour, wellbeing and sense of belonging.
She is the author of Designed for Wellbeing and Student Thrive Mode: How to Hack Your Mind & Body for University Success, which explores the foundations that help young people thrive at university, from sleep, movement and nutrition to connection and the spaces in which they live.
Reference:
UK Parliament, House of Commons Library (2025). Student mental health in England: Statistics, policy, and guidance. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8320/
