What is Liveability Lens?
Liveability Lens is a people-focused design review that explores how your building and open spaces works for those who use them — across a full day, not just in peak times.
It’s not about how the building was designed to work — it’s about how it actually works in real life.
We look at how different users move through, access, and experience the building or open space, across all times of day. From where staff leave their bags to how café noise travels at night, or where food deliveries end up — these overlooked details can make a place feel intuitive and safe, or clunky and uncomfortable.
Why It Matters
“Liveability is more than ticking boxes.
It’s about how people live and work in a space
— not just how it’s drawn.”
By applying Liveability Lens, we help identify risks before they become complaints, retrofits, or long-term management headaches — supporting better design decisions, smoother approvals, and stronger outcomes for the people who live, work and move through the space every day.
Three components to Liveability Lens
User Personas
Liveability Lens looks at the building or open space through User Personas. The people that could live, work or play in the building you design or develop.
Each User Persona has different needs and desires and that can be tested throughout the process.
Building Typology
Liveability Lens recognises that buildings and open spaces aren’t all the same. For example, a mixed use building might include residents, a childcare centre and a 24 hour gym, while another has retail, offices and a pub. Each combination brings a different mix of people, behaviours, opportunities and risks.
Time of Day Rhythms
Liveability Lens considers how a building or open space functions differently across the day — from early morning to late at night. These changing patterns affect who uses the space, how they move through it, and what makes it feel welcoming or difficult at different times.
Liveability Lens Assessment
We provide Liveability Lens assessments to help you understand how your development will be used and experienced across a full day — from early morning to late night.
Our review identifies where design choices may create friction, risk or inefficiency for different user groups, including residents, staff, visitors, and service providers.
We assess access, movement, amenity, safety, servicing, and daily operations — and offer practical recommendations to make the building or open space easier to use, manage and maintain. These assessments can be undertaken as a standalone service or in conjunction with a CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) assessment for a more comprehensive review of safety, usability, and long-term performance.
What typologies do we assess?
We assess all building and open space typologies.
Examples of building typologies include:
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Residential flat buildings
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Mixed use developments
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Shopping centres
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Neighbourhood shops
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Commercial development
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Bulk Goods retail
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Service Centres
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Train Stations and their retail and commercial uses.
Examples of open space typologies include:
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Parks
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Sports Precincts
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Plazas and Town Squares
Liveability Lens Tools
If your curious and not ready for an assessment we are building free tools to help you test your development.
Take a look at one of the tools from Retail Lens below and test the travel path of staff leaving or arriving to work.
More tools will be rolled out as they are developed.