The Enduring Value of a Physical Workplace: 2019 – 2025 Insights Report

This report presents findings from a six-year longitudinal Design Thinking Research Project conducted by UNSW Sydney in collaboration with workplace design practice Davenport Campbell. Initiated in October 2019, the study sought to investigate emergent generational perspectives on the value and future of physical workplace environments by engaging third-year Interior Architecture students and early-career employees across Australia's finance, technology, construction, and retail sectors through structured annual workshops. The final report synthesises longitudinal insights spanning 2019–2025, with analytical focus on the three most recent years, presented at a point of thematic saturation. Adopting a qualitative research design, the study documents a clear trajectory in next-generation workplace sentiment: from aspirations for sensory-rich, experimentally oriented environments in 2023, through demands for holistic wellbeing, environmental quality, and equity in 2024, to a pragmatic insistence on autonomy, accountability, and authentic organisational purpose in 2025. Longitudinal analysis identifies four enduring themes that transcend year-to-year sentiment shifts: the inextricable relationship between physical workplace environments and the development of professional identity through in-person behavioural modelling and feedback mechanisms; the role of shared embodied experience in fostering social capital, belonging, and person-environment fit; the semiotic significance of material and spatial quality as a communicator of organisational values; and the primacy of psychological safety as enabled through hierarchical workplace comfort. Drawing on Vischer's tripartite comfort framework and self-determination theory, the report proposes that physical, functional, and psychological comfort operate as a critical conduit through which workplaces activate place attachment, professional identity formation, and sustainable intrinsic motivation. In doing so, the empirical findings substantiate and extend the theoretical propositions advanced by Durakovic and Aznavoorian in their chapter on sense of belonging and professional identity in the Routledge Handbook of High-Performance Workplaces (2024), providing longitudinal qualitative evidence in support of the comfort-belonging-identity framework articulated therein. The findings further suggest that organisational debates centred on hybrid attendance mandates are insufficient in the absence of substantive investment in the quality, adaptability, and authentic purposefulness of physical workplace environments. The report concludes with evidence-based recommendations for workplace strategy and a generationally informed design manifesto.