Design for Safety – is everyone safe?
A public seminar by Jenny McLaughlin, Principal Project Manager on the Heathrow Airport Expansion programme
About the Talk
What does a healthy building look like if it doesn't work for everyone in it? Jenny McLaughlin has spent 18 years at Heathrow, one of the most complicated built environments in the country, and she has a blunt answer. Accessibility isn't an add-on. It's a precondition.
In this talk she introduces Systematic Inclusion, her approach to designing accessibility in from the start rather than bolting it on at the end. Jenny co-authored the RIBA Inclusive Design Overlay in 2023 and helped launch the Equitable Safety Initiative in 2025, and she'll draw on both to show what changes when you treat inclusion as a systems problem instead of a series of individual adjustments.
She'll also talk openly about being dyslexic and having ADHD, and why she sees the way her brain works as an advantage when you're designing for the full range of people who walk through a door.
It should be a useful hour for anyone in engineering, architecture, public health or policy, and for anyone whose research keeps bumping into the question of who our buildings actually work for.
The talk will cover
Systematic Inclusion in practice, at the scale of a major infrastructure programme
The RIBA Inclusive Design Overlay, what it is and why it matters for research and practice
The Equitable Safety Initiative, and safety as a question of equity
Neurodiversity as an asset, and what different thinking brings to the built environment
About Jenny McLaughlin
Jenny McLaughlin has worked in the airport industry for over 20 years. She started at East Midlands Airport and has spent the last 18 at Heathrow, moving through Environment, Airside and now Infrastructure, where she is a Principal Project Manager on the Expansion programme.
Jenny has delivered a wide range of business changes, from new IT applications to infrastructure projects including taxiway rehabilitation, fire training facilities, and the new Virtual Contingency Facility.
She is a co-author of the RIBA Inclusive Design Overlay (published 2023) and a key figure in the launch of the Equitable Safety Initiative (2025). She speaks regularly at industry events on Systematic Inclusion and the role of accessibility in keeping the built environment safe and sustainable.
Jenny is a Governor for Harrow Richmond and Uxbridge College and leads the Heathrow Inclusive Learners Partnership, creating equitable pathways for learners into the industry. She is dyslexic and has ADHD, and as she puts it, "the way that my brain is wired differently is an asset."
This seminar has taken place
Thursday 17 September 2026. Our write-up asks how Jenny's agency scale copes with something nobody can see.
Next in the series: Burning for Warmth, Thursday 19 November.