With fairness and inclusion on the forefront of world conversations, HOK is taking decisive motion to embed these values into the constructed setting.

HOK’s Designing for Fairness Toolkit represents a significant step towards creating areas that serve everybody, no matter their background or talents.

The toolkit, accessible to all HOK design groups, gives a roadmap for creating inclusive, community-focused areas. Requirements and greatest practices discovered within the toolkit are grounded in 5 core design rules:

1. Partnering with the group: Integrating group historical past and connections and addressing group wants.
2. Planning for inclusion: Designing for variety by figuring out and addressing particular person wants, necessities and wishes.
3. Offering fairness of expertise: Creating accessible and welcoming areas for everybody and designing for the variety of the human situation.
4. Selling well being and well-being: Offering wholesome areas for all individuals to thrive. Providing entry to nature, recreation and daylight for individuals’s well-being.
5. Championing environmental justice: Advocating for options that tackle environmental justice via beneficiant, resilient and sustainable methods.

Architects Katherine Antarikso (above left) and Caitlin Teen (proper) in HOK’s Philadelphia studio led the event of the toolkit. It started as a grassroots effort in 2020 when the pandemic and social justice actions underscored the necessity for equitable and inclusive areas. The toolkit quickly earned funding from HOK’s Analysis Program and help from HOK’s senior management.

“With this toolkit, we’re not simply speaking about designing for fairness—we’re taking actionable steps,” stated Antarikso. “Our challenge groups now have a strategy to really do it, primarily based on our personal analysis and expertise.”

“Due to help from HOK’s leaders, we have now the chance to alter the trajectory of a world design agency and set a brand new commonplace for the way forward for structure and design,” added Teen.

As a part of the HOK challenge course of guidelines, the toolkit gives a information for every milestone, outlining objectives, obligations and accessible assets. Over the previous yr, HOK design groups examined the Designing for Fairness Toolkit within the planning and design for  initiatives together with AstraZeneca’s new analysis and growth middle below growth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York Metropolis Soccer Membership’s future stadium in Queens.

For the 470,000-sq.-ft. AstraZeneca R&D website (above), HOK’s staff led visioning periods with the shopper’s inclusion and variety group to outline fairness objectives. The staff requested questions like, “How would you like individuals to really feel once they’re within the constructing?” In these periods, the shopper prioritized offering a welcoming setting with fairness of expertise and particular person management, whereas supporting design methods for neurodiversity. In response, HOK expanded accessibility far past code minimums, built-in biophilic components and offered a wide range of facilities and work settings. AstraZeneca will use this challenge as a mannequin for incorporating fairness rules into its future initiatives.

For the 25,000-seat New York Metropolis FC stadium, reimagining a former industrial dumping floor as an inviting public area was a key fairness transfer for the MLS soccer membership. Different equitable design options championed by NYCFC included devoted locker rooms for girls coaches and grownup altering stations for households. The sustainable design methods will make this Main League Soccer’s first totally electrical soccer stadium.

HOK co-CEO Susan Klumpp-Williams recommended the work of these concerned in creating the Designing for Fairness Toolkit.

“That is one thing all corporations might want to do, and we’re proud to be main the best way,” stated Klumpp-Williams. “By embracing the Designing for Fairness Toolkit, we will set up a brand new commonplace for inclusive, equitable design for all individuals.”