Perspectives June 7, 2025

Beyond the Gym: Designing an Ecology of Well-Being and Care

By Rania Karamallah

On many college campuses today, well-being is addressed through a set of standalone services: gyms, health centers, athletic fields, and support programs. While these facilities are often well-equipped, they can remain physically and functionally disconnected from students’ daily routines. The result is a narrow approach to well-being—one that emphasizes physical fitness and clinical care but overlooks everyday needs, such as the ability to decompress, share a meal with friends, or sit in silence and feel safe.

What if, instead, well-being wasn’t thought of as a destination or a facility, but as a condition that flows through the campus experience? What if it were less about services students must seek out and schedule, and more about an environment designed to support balance, connection, access, and care throughout the day?

Through recent engagement efforts on campuses across the country, we’ve come to better realize the growing need for a “well-being ecology” rooted in relationships between space, routine, and access. Students are asking us to expand the conversation beyond “wellness” as individual self-care and towards “well-being” as shared experiences. They are calling for interconnected spaces that support balance and foster belonging and allow for both solitude and connection in the quieter in-between moment of campus life, not just high-energy activity or moments of acute care; not as an add-on to their schedule, but as a condition of it. The result is an environment of social well-being that cultivates community, makes space for intuitive and informal interaction, and encourages collective care.

To make this shift, we are expanding how we design spaces that support all students. Instead of focusing on individual behaviors such as exercising, eating well, and managing stress, which are usually addressed through structured programs, we approach well-being as something more holistic. We’re turning our attention to students’ sense of connection, safety, purpose, and belonging, which can be shaped by the spaces they move through and the systems that guide their routines.

When we design with these drivers in mind, we create environments where well-being isn’t something students have to find—it’s something they live within.

four students sitting in a lounge playing games

University of California San Diego, Pepper Canyon West Student Housing

La Jolla, California

Diagram of a circle spectrum of collective and individual, quiet and active, well-being activities

When we mapped what students described, a clear spectrum of well-being spaces emerged, ranging from still to active, and from individual to collective. Student feedback points to the need for both dynamic and restorative zones: places to move, gather, reflect, and connect.

It Begins with Listening

In a recent engagement process with students on a private college campus in New England, we received feedback across both structured and open-ended prompts. In this conversation, a hierarchy of well-being needs surfaced:

• 40% emphasized nutrition: valuing not just healthy food, but the social experience of shared meals.

• 39% emphasized social and emotional well-being: prioritizing meaningful connection to self and others.

• 21% emphasized physical fitness well-being: caring for a heathy and active body.

These results echoed across hundreds of student voices—and research backs them up. As Strange and Banning write in Educating by Design: Creating Campus Learning Environments That Work (2001), “educational environments are most powerful when they offer students three fundamental conditions: a sense of security and inclusion, mechanisms for involvement, and an experience of community.”

Students also described:

Social lounges that offer a place to simply be, without competition or performance
Quiet nooks for self-reflection and decompression
Flexible, inclusive multipurpose studios that support movement for all experience levels
Fitness spaces that are welcoming to beginners and non-athletes alike
Gender-inclusive locker rooms and restrooms that honor diverse identities and cultural practices
Outdoor areas intentionally designed for pause and presence not just passage

Student requests for fire pits, hammocks, lounges, and green spaces may seem frivolous, but they point to deeper gaps in how campus planning supports belonging. These are spaces of softness, restoration, and informal community, and are especially important for students who feel peripheral to dominant well-being narratives, such as BIPOC students, international students, and non-athletes.

Aerial view rendering of nature trail with people walking

Rendering of naure path with person's hand holding phone

University of New Hampshire Master Plan

For this campus, well-being is being approached as a holistic ecosystem. One key planning strategy is the connection of students to native landscaping and enhanced biodiversity through a ravine and a nature trail boardwalk.

Rendering of people viewing art mural and nature path

Delaware State University Master Plan

Relaxation, movement, nutrition, and community grounded this master plan’s well-being framework and informed our recommendations to integrate vibrant, accessible outdoor spaces.

aerial map diagram with pedestrian connection highlighted

La Salle Athletics and Recreation Master Plan

Recognizing that the connectivity and adjacency of key recreational, athletic, and student life hubs are essential to well-being for all, we proposed a central pedestrian link to unify these previously disconnected programs.

Planning for Spatially Intelligent Well-Being

A coordinated strategy of campus and interior space planning gives us multiple vantage points to approach collective well-being, resulting in intentional, integrated interventions that offer students permission to rest, gather, and simply be. Spatially intelligent well-being considers adjacency and connectivity when defining where a well-being facility or main anchor is located on campus, what it connects to, and how students get there. For example, when a fitness facility is adjacent to natural trails, student dining spaces, or community cultural anchors, it encourages intuitive patterns of movement, rest, and engagement. And when it is linked to other parts of campus through clear, safe, welcoming paths with nodes that encourage social gathering, those routes become part of the well-being experience, too.

Within buildings, programmatic adjacencies matter just as much. Placing reflection rooms next to fitness areas, or communal kitchens next to multipurpose studios, allows students to move between activity and recovery, solitude and connection, without friction. This fluidity supports a more human-centered and inclusive well-being culture that blurs the boundaries between athletes and non-athletes, staff and faculty, and instead centers a shared culture of care rooted in presence, accessibility, and belonging.

Key Principles for Spatially Intelligent Well-Being

In collaboration with our Sports, Recreation, and Entertainment Leader, Jennifer Williams, we developed a set of spatially intelligent well-being strategies that scale from interior environments to campus-wide planning.

Integrate, don’t isolate. Well-being should be supported by the full network of campus life. Strategically position well-being anchors near key student destinations like dining halls, green spaces, academic buildings, and cultural hubs. But just as importantly, embed wellness throughout the everyday campus fabric. Integration across spaces reinforces that well-being is not a detour or a destination.
Design for presence in motion. Prioritize the connective tissue of campus: walkways, thresholds, courtyards, trails, and transition zones that support pause as much as passage. These spaces should offer reasons to linger through seating, shade, daylight, wayfinding, and moments for solitude or connection. When students experience wellness through how they move, not just what they access, it becomes part of the campus rhythm, not a break from it.
Design for emotional experience. Lighting, acoustics, views of nature, and scale all affect how students feel. Calming, comfortable, and sensorially supportive environments invite students to stay, rest, and return.
Serve all bodies and backgrounds. Inclusive design means recognizing the full diversity of students across gender, race, body type, mobility, and cultural norms. This includes gender-inclusive locker rooms, multi-size seating, private areas for prayer or reflection, and spaces that reflect the cultural fabric of the student body.
Design for non-human and human life connections. Consider natural plantings, restored biodiverse landscapes, and programmed outdoor space as essential elements that support well-being, not only for human life but all forms of life. Opportunities to connect with nature promote a sense of meaning and stewardship, helping students feel part of something larger than themselves and counterbalancing stress and disconnection that can accompany campus life.

Hand drawn sketch of walkway by waterfront

Many campuses organize key well-being resources, fitness, recreation, counseling, and movement spaces within centralized facilities. These hubs can serve as anchors in a broader ecology of care only if we expand our design to other touchpoints in the campus ecosystem and consider interior planning as well.

Toward an Ecology of Care

The strategies mentioned here were successful for a number of campuses we’ve seen, but we know that each project presents unique community needs and challenges. Through conscientious engagement and integrated planning, we can create tailored ecosystems for students to thrive.

Embedding well-being starts during community engagement and is realized by follow-through on community-informed designs. We should ask: can students and the larger campus community find spaces that support pause and presence across their daily routines? Can they move from a classroom or an office to a quiet nook, from a green space to a lounge, with ease? Can faculty, staff, and students share the same spaces of restoration and care without hierarchy?

When well-being is embedded across the campus, it becomes something students can trust. Something they can return to. Something that quietly affirms that “you belong”. As designers and planners, we must move beyond programmatic checklists toward ecologies of care. The question is not whether well-being exists in theory, but whether it is spatially experienced in ways that are consistent, accessible, and culturally legible.

Beyond the Gym: Designing an Ecology of Well-Being and Care

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