Tom Bright
Post Occupancy Evaluation/Social Value Photographer & Research

Tom is an established architectural photographer who has been published widely, including in Dezeen, The Architects’ Journal and the BBC. He is responsible for photographing our projects and for innovating new research methods for the post occupancy evaluation of social value.

He has worked on commissions for prominent architects such as Make Architects and Pollard Thomas Edwards Associates. His background is as an in-house photographer for Stride Treglown Architects. There he pioneered a new approach to marketing architecture in the campaign ‘inhabitant’ which is series of informal interviews and images that document the user experience.  The unique insights from range of diverse users were fed back to the design team to help continue to develop designs that embodied social value.

In collaboration with HTA, Tom is currently studying towards a PhD titled Architectural photography as a visual ethnography method for the Post-Occupancy Evaluation of social value in architectural design. The research builds upon the ‘RIBA Social Value Architecture Toolkit 2020’ and addresses the current gap and need for visual ethnographic research in the architecture industry for POE. Equally as important, it aims to bridge the gap between research and visual communication of social value to avoid unnecessary value engineering.