Most briefs arrive without a users attached to them.
A floor plate and a headcount. A hotel with an occupancy target. A residential development where nobody has moved in yet, and won’t for two years. A public space serving a population that changes by the hour.
Somewhere in that brief are the people who will actually live with the interior we design — who will concentrate or fail to concentrate in it, sleep or not sleep in it, feel welcome in it or quietly avoid it. Designing for their wellbeing means knowing something real about them. So the first question we ask on any project is not what the space should look like. It is: who is this actually for, and how can we find out?
What we mean by a User Profile
A User Profile is similar to a persona as in the marketing sense, where a stock photograph and a set of invented tasks or hobbies might be attached. It is an informed structured picture of the people who will occupy this specific project’s spaces we are working on, covering the things that genuinely drive their comfort and informs a design supports them and does not work against them.
That includes their values and motivations; what they need in order to perform, and what gets in the way; how occupants relate to one another, and how much they need to be apart. Their perception of beauty, their response to colour, their sensory tolerances. The rhythms of their day and how organisations need operational flows to work.
Assembled properly, a User Profile does three things. It tells us what the space has to do. It gives the whole project team — us, the client, the contractors, the facilities managers who inherit the building — a shared reference point, so decisions are coordinated rather than negotiated one at a time. And it takes personal taste out of the conversation, avoiding biases of what we all think is right and needed and helps us listen more to occupant preferences instead. When a proposal is questioned, the answer is not “because we like it.” It is “because of what we know about the people who will use this.”
That last function is the one clients and users feel most quickly. It changes the character of a design review.
We ask for access first — and we ask why not
The best source of a User Profile is the users themselves. So we ask to have access to them.
On occasion the answer is no, or not exactly. And the reason matters more than the refusal, because in our experience the barriers are rarely about unwillingness. They are structural, and they are usually solvable.
Sometimes the project lead simply does not know that occupant engagement is a step — it has not been part of the process they have run before, so it has not been programmed in. Sometimes fees have been tendered so thin that no briefing stage survives. Sometimes the programme has been compressed until the human part is the first thing cut, because it looks optional on a Gantt chart.
None of these are laws of nature. They are habits of recent project and market culture, and they are a large part of why so many buildings or interiors are technically compliant and quietly unpleasant or unproductive to be in. We think it is our job as interior designers to identify this and to propose the adjustment, rather than absorb it silently and design around the gap.
So before we reach for a workaround (we do this too), we make the case for the real thing.
When access genuinely isn’t possible
Sometimes it isn’t, and we still have an interior to design. These are the routes we use, in order of preference.
1. Go to the client’s own teams. Marketing, HR, brand, customer services, business development, account management. These departments are sitting on an enormous amount of occupant insight and frequently do not know it counts as design data. They have segmentation studies, engagement surveys, exit interviews, complaint logs, customer research. In our experience they are glad to be asked, because a space that serves the people they are trying to recruit, retain or attract serves their objectives too.
There is a longer-term prize here as well. If marketing, HR and the design team are all working from the same User Profiles, everyone is aiming towards the same experience rather than three competing versions of it. A much more effective collaborative outcome that generates more value for the client and comfort for occupants and other stakeholders.
2. Build from the outside in. Local demographic data. Sector activity and policies. Social trends in the area. The client’s own market research, which they will often share — sometimes under an NDA, which is a small price for genuinely useful material. Broad strokes, but honest ones, and better than individual assumptions dressed up as insight.
3. Define by exclusion, then go and look. When there is very little to work with, we start from who these users are definitely not, and narrow the shape inwards until it is tight enough to guide decisions.
Then we go to the spaces themselves and spend time on site and in the surrounding area — a few hours, or days spread across a project — watching how people actually behave. At different times of day, in different weather, in different seasons. Where do they linger, where do they hurry, what do they avoid, what do they improvise? Nothing in a report replaces standing in a space with your own designer senses engaged, and your experience being engaged. Where a site visit isn’t possible, there is a surprising amount to be learned from what people themselves post about a place online!
Being honest about the difference
Here is the part we share out loud to clients, because we think it matters knowing the choice they have.
None of these substitutes produce what real occupant data produces. They are wider approximations, and approximations will fall shorter of the impact that proper engagement can make.
So when access is withheld, we believe it important to clarify what that costs financially and on human terms — what the design will and won’t be able to do as a result — and let the clients make a conscious choice rather than an accidental one. Occasionally they reconsider and the door opens. Sometimes they don’t, and this might be for all sort of reasons, and we proceed on a shared understanding of the compromise. Either way, nobody discovers the gap eighteen months after handover and a better outcome is still achieved.
Designing in a vacuum is not a neutral act. It is a decision, and it should be made deliberately, by the people paying for – and living with – the outcome.
Why we work this way
Because a building and its interiors is not finished when it is handed over. It is finished when someone works well in it, rests well in it, feels steadier in it than they would outside of it.
You cannot design for that in the abstract. You have to know something true about the people it is for — and if you cannot meet them, you owe them the effort of finding out anyway.
Grigoriou Interiors works on interiors where occupant wellbeing is a measurable outcome rather than an aspiration. If you have a project where the users are hard to reach, we are always glad to talk about how to approach it. Find out more about our design services here.
