Well-being as a design parameter

Marta Olivieri is an engineer, Partner and Chief Sustainability Officer at DVArea, and Director of ODUElab, the department dedicated to researching and developing regenerative solutions that support people’s well-being and balance with the surrounding natural and built environment. In this interview, we discussed environmental, social and economic sustainability, how it can be integrated into a project, and how it can be measured.

Marta, your career path is far from linear, which makes it particularly interesting. Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

My journey began with the intention of becoming an architect, but it soon took a slightly different turn: I chose to study building and architectural engineering. As our CEO, Armando Casella, likes to say, I am a “hybrid.” Indeed, this hybrid nature has always defined me.
I joined DVArea working in research and development, but over the years I also took on the roles of Design Coordinator and Project Manager, directly overseeing projects, teams, and construction sites. This was a fundamental experience, as it allowed me to truly understand how ideas become reality, navigating complexity, constraints, and real responsibilities.
At the same time, I have always felt the need to explore widely. I am the sort of person who would struggle to do the same thing for too long: I need to explore, question, and shift perspective.
In this sense, DVArea was the ideal environment for me: it allowed me to experiment, to understand myself, and to gain a deep understanding of the sector, moving between design, process, and research.
Over time, it became increasingly important for me not only to design, but to understand how to improve the way we design. At a certain point, I realised that many of the critical issues we faced were not related to the project itself, but to how decisions were made upstream: unclear objectives, lack of metrics, and difficulty balancing environmental, economic, and qualitative requirements. From there, a question emerged: how much can a project improve if we work earlier – and better – on defining the problem?
My role gradually shifted in that direction: working in the early stages, building decision-making frameworks, integrating ESG tools, and supporting teams in making more informed choices. It was not a move away from design, but a change in scale.
This is where my path towards sustainability, process innovation, and impact measurement tools began.

Rather than a change in direction, it was a natural evolution: from working within the project to working on the conditions that enable the project to be better.

Your innovative approach led you to play a key role in conceiving and developing ODUElab, which began as an innovative start-up and is now a structured department with a clear mission: to restore centrality to the human being and innovate design processes to ensure well-being and environmental protection. How has this vision evolved over time, and what are its current pillars?

ODUElab was created to bring into design what too often remains at the margins: sustainability, well-being, and impact measurement. At first, it was a small core of research and experimentation, but over time it has become a structured department working across projects, helping to build the decision-making foundations even before a project takes shape. The vision evolved precisely in this direction: not to add complexity, but to increase awareness and the quality of decisions.

Today, ODUElab’s work is structured around several key pillars:

Impact measurement
From the environmental scale to the human scale: we work to make the effects of design decisions quantifiable, integrating ESG tools, LCA, certifications, and proprietary indicators.

Environmental well-being
Approached in an integrated way, considering physical, perceptual, and cognitive aspects. Not just comfort, but the quality of spatial experience.

360° sustainability
Environmental, social, and economic: three dimensions that must interact rather than be treated as separate compartments.

Digital DNA
We use data, simulations, and digital tools to support decision-making and make design increasingly evidence-based.

Disciplinary cross-pollination
We integrate expertise beyond architecture: environmental psychology, biophilia, neuroscience. This allows us to interpret space not only as a built object, but as an experience.

In this sense, ODUElab is not just a department, but an infrastructure that connects research and design, with the aim of generating measurable architectural quality and long-term value.

How do you frame sustainability within your work? In what ways do the environmental and social dimensions intertwine in your design practice?

For us, sustainability is not a set of requirements to be met, but a criterion through which we interpret and guide every design decision.
We work across three dimensions – environmental, social, and economic – which we do not treat as separate domains, but as an interdependent system.
The environmental dimension concerns reducing impacts: energy, materials, life cycle, and emissions. The social dimension concerns people: health, comfort, perception, and the quality of spatial experience. The economic dimension concerns value: durability, attractiveness, and the asset’s ability to maintain performance over time.
The key point, however, is not to consider them individually, but to understand how they influence one another.
A highly energy-efficient building that generates stress or disorientation is not sustainable. Likewise, a space that is extremely pleasant but environmentally inefficient does not represent an adequate solution.
In our work, these dimensions are intertwined through an evidence-based approach, which allows us to connect design choices to real outcomes for users and the environment. We use concrete tools – LCA analysis, certifications, well-being indicators, environmental simulations, and decision-making models – to make trade-offs explicit and support more informed decisions.
The goal is to embed sustainability into the project in an operational way, not a declarative one. Not as an additional layer, but as an integral part of architectural quality.

Sustainability is not an end-of-project goal, but a condition that must be established from the very beginning.

What kinds of professional profiles and skills coexist within ODUElab? How do you build a team capable of operating across research, well-being, and design?

ODUElab was created precisely from the convergence of different areas of expertise that rarely coexist in a structured way within traditional design processes.
The team consists of architects with environmental expertise, sustainability and certification specialists, researchers, data analysts, and professionals focused on well-being, such as environmental psychologists, neuroscientists, and educational experts.
This diversity is not only technical, but also relates to ways of thinking: some work through construction details, others through models, and others through scientific evidence.
The challenge – and at the same time the value – lies in enabling these languages to interact.
Building a team like ours means not only bringing together different skills, but also selecting people with an open mindset, capable of moving across disciplines and questioning their own perspectives.
For this reason, we place great emphasis on methodology: defining clear objectives, shared tools, and structured opportunities for discussion that allow very different competences to be translated into concrete design decisions. Integration is not automatic, but a continuous process.
It is in this cross-pollination that innovation emerges: when different disciplines stop working in parallel and begin to truly influence one another.

What is the concrete contribution of your department across the different phases of a project? How is your approach translated into operational terms? 

Our contribution varies across the different phases of a project, but it is always guided by a single objective: enabling the team to make more informed decisions based on data and clear goals.
In the early stages, we focus on problem framing: defining ESG objectives, identifying priorities, and establishing a decision-making framework that guides the entire subsequent development. During the design phase, we support teams in operational choices by integrating environmental analyses, LCA assessments, simulations, and tools for evaluating well-being and certification requirements. At this stage, our role is to make trade-offs explicit and support choices that align with the defined objectives.
In the later stages, we concentrate on verification and value enhancement: measuring performance, aligning the project with standards and frameworks (such as the EU Taxonomy or certification protocols), and helping to make the generated value clear and communicable.
In addition to project work, we develop specific external services, such as sustainability advisory pathways, support in defining ESG strategies, and the preparation of tools like EPDs, which allow this approach to extend beyond individual projects.
In this sense, ODUElab is not only a project support unit but also a driver for developing new services and competencies within DVArea.
Operationally, this translates into concrete tools: decision-making models, indicators, checklists, simulations, and structured discussions with project teams.
We are not an external support that intervenes at the end, but an integral part of the process.
Our work is about transforming complex objectives into concrete design decisions.

On the occasion of Race for the Cure, you developed a questionnaire aimed at investigating how patients, caregivers, and hospital staff experience healthcare spaces. What emerged from this research? And what surprised you most?

The research provided a very clear picture: healthcare spaces today function well from a clinical perspective, but they often fail to adequately address the human, emotional, and relational needs of those who use them.
Across all groups – patients, caregivers, and staff – certain dimensions emerged as particularly critical: privacy, the possibility of personalising space, and the presence of elements that enable distraction and psychological decompression during the care experience.
At the same time, some clear needs strongly stood out: the presence of nature and natural light, spaces dedicated to social interaction, and greater attention to orientation and spatial legibility.
One particularly interesting finding concerns the most critical spaces: waiting rooms and relational areas, which are currently perceived as transitional spaces that are often bare, crowded, and unwelcoming, while in reality they are central moments of the experience, where waiting, stress, and the need for support are concentrated.
What struck me most is how shared these needs are, regardless of role: the perspective changes, but the underlying request does not – to feel welcomed, oriented, and supported.
This strongly reinforces an idea we have been working on for some time: designing healthcare spaces means designing not only for function, but for experience.
And even small elements – light, nature, the possibility of choice – can have a significant impact on perceived well-being and, in some cases, even on healthcare outcomes.

You are currently working on the development of well-being indices for environmental monitoring and design support. Can you share some preliminary information about this tool and its potential applications?

We have developed a system of indices with a clear objective: to make measurable what is currently, for the most part, intuitive.
In architectural design, we are accustomed to measuring technical performance – energy use, consumption, emissions – very precisely, but we measure far less the effects that spaces have on people.
Our work focuses on this shift: connecting design decisions to real impacts on users.

The system integrates three levels:

• objective environmental data (light, air quality, thermal-hygrometric comfort, acoustics)
• perceptual and behavioural dimensions (how people experience and interpret space)
• outcomes, meaning the concrete effects on well-being, productivity, and quality of experience

It is not a simple rating system, but a decision-making tool that supports designers and clients in evaluating different design options more consciously.
We are already applying it across several projects and contexts – from workplace environments to healthcare and hospitality – with the aim of progressively extending this approach to the urban scale as well.
This represents an important shift: from intuition-based design to evidence-based design, where decisions are guided by data and measurable impacts.
The goal is to transform well-being from an abstract concept into a design parameter.

The emphasis on people’s well-being in spatial design has become increasingly central to the debate on integrated design. Is this a cultural trend, a response to new needs, or something more structural? And how does it translate into concrete innovation?

I do not believe it is a trend, but rather a structural transformation. In recent years, the way we experience spaces has changed: we spend more time indoors, in complex environments with high cognitive and emotional intensity. This makes well-being not an optional aspect, but a central one.
At the same time, the way we evaluate buildings is also changing: not only in terms of technical performance, but also in terms of their effects on people and their behaviour. In this sense, well-being becomes a full-fledged design issue.
The real innovation lies not so much in introducing new elements, but in changing the way we make decisions: integrating data, scientific evidence, and measurement tools into the design process. This is where the topic becomes concrete.
When we can connect design choices to outcomes – in terms of health, productivity, and quality of experience – well-being ceases to be an abstract concept and becomes a design and strategic lever.
Designing today means taking responsibility for the effects that spaces generate over time.