How do you quantify joy, connection, or belonging? How do you track a sense of ownership, dignity, or empowerment? How do you measure a building's contribution to local identity?

Understanding social impact in the built environment remains elusive.

Impact evolves over time and rarely fits neatly into a spreadsheet. There’s no shared definition, language, or metrics to measure against. What’s more, social value is inherently subjective — what feels significant to one person may create a barrier for another.

Yet too often, whether out of lack of awareness, convenience, or to save money, these outcomes are left to chance or treated as someone else’s responsibility.

Finding clarity in the complex

hcma has been looking for solutions for this for over two decades. So, over the course of 2025, together with graphic designer Nicole Retief (Warm Fuzzy Cool), we worked with hcma's leadership and staff to turn their framework for creating places with meaningful social outcomes into a clear, practical publication.

Structured by three scales of impact — the individual, group, and wider community — Include, Enable, Connect sets out to transform vague concepts of social impact into clear goals to guide the design process and measurable outcomes that can be evaluated once the project is complete. 

Every decision we make as architects shapes how people feel, connect, and take part in the world around them. We need to be more intentional about those outcomes so we don't miss the responsibility that comes with shaping the built environment.

— Darryl Condon, managing principal, hcma

A guide of two halves

The first half explores the thinking behind the framework — its principles, intentions, and underpinning academic research. Here, you’ll find insights drawn from social science and professional experience, alongside project case studies and examples of the framework in practice. 

The second offers practical ideas and actions for applying the framework during different stages of a project, from Pre-Design through to Post-Occupancy Evaluation. 

Environmental performance became mainstream not because individual firms approached it alone, but because knowledge was shared, tested, and standardized across disciplines. The same must happen with social impact."

— Melissa Higgs, principal, hcma

The resulting guide makes an incredibly complex subject easy to follow.

It's a snapshot of where hcma is today in an ongoing journey. Not a definitive endpoint, but an invitation to join them as they seek to better understand how design decisions translate into meaningful social outcomes. 

If you're looking to publish something special, let's talk.