The Mayfield Project – Sydney March 2025

Sydney. Three days. A gathering of architects, designers, and educators. The goal? To uncover what truly makes a learning environment successful.

This is The Mayfield Project 2025.

The focus centered on human interactions. A crucial realisation emerged early on: Success needs to be far better defined at the start of a project. Schools invest millions in buildings, but how often do they truly measure whether those spaces deliver the experiences they were meant to?

And how often is community consultation curtailed, cancelled or plain ignored in the name of cost saving or urgency, instead of being seen as a tiny proportion of investment that makes multi-million-dollar projects more likely to succeed in the long run?

That led to a tougher question: Who gets to define success? Architects admitted they can lack the credibility to evaluate the success of learning and teaching in the spaces they design. And educators often expect designers to arrive with answers, not more questions.

So rather than jumping straight into designing spaces, our teams started to define the learning experiences that could take place in them. Because in the end, a building is only as successful as the learning that happens inside it.

The Mayfield Project 2025 isn’t about drawing up blueprints. It’s about challenging assumptions, reframing the conversation, and designing from the inside out.

Article by: Ewan Tosh, Founder & CEO - NoTosh, Scotland