Dear Colleagues,
This comes from Kerry London at
Newcastle University.
Please respond to her at:
[log in to unmask]
Or visit her Web site at:
http://www.ausi.com.au/klondon/index.html
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
A number of posts have raised issues regarding user
studies/briefing/programming and the field of post occupancy
evaluations.
I found Lubomir's last contribution particularly interesting I
would have to agree with much of what he said about the difficulties
of using the information and knowledge gained from the POE process
and the schism between researchers and designers. There is the famous
mantra in the POE field regarding the research results of the POE
60s: useful
70s: usable
80s: used
and 'used' meant that design firms were being commissioned to
effectively conduct POEs to develop briefs. Although this wave of
private sector commercialism did not hit Australia till I would say
about the early 90s - and for a particular building type. (I
commissioned a number of POEs in the mid 90s as part of Strategic
Facility Plans). What I have found is that the POE has largely moved
from the wider contextual questioning/evaluation conducted by
academic researchers to the narrower individual building evaluation
for commercial interests. This is not a criticism though.
If anyone is interested my website below has a literature review on
the historical development of the POE field from 1960-1997 in
architecture/building across US/UK/Canada/Australia (please forgive
me for those key works not included from other countries). It is a
field that many have assumed is dominated by one or two key players
however there are many more quieter researchers who contributed
enormously to its development (and whom still make significant
contributions today).
There is also a critique of the field - towards the development of a
conceptual model based on addressing why much of the POE material and
results do not actually find their way back into the programming of
the mythical future projects albeit with the best of intentions or
if they do it takes some 2 - 3 years. Also the field lacks a certain
depth of theory development so this was a small attempt to develop
some grounded theory. The proposition was then put forward to examine
the idealistic situation where key stakeholders are brought together
to define performance based upon the notion that these stakeholders
had 'expert' knowledge, (before any decisions had been made.)
The research then went further to try and understand empirically the
difficulties of managing 'expert/specialist' knowledge in the early
phases of a project by analysing 2 focus group interviews set up as
simulations of an early design meeting.
There are limitations to the research and this was meant as an
exploratory investigation into understanding the difficulties of the
concept of key use and producer stakeholders defining performance
from multiple perspectives. The data was analysed from a
constructivist perspective and interpreted using group theory
concepts (structure, power, networks, formation etc). The original
premise was that it is the receptiveness by producer stakeholders to
user stakeholders as providers of knowledge that would be one of the
greatest difficulties and this held true BUT also more broadly the
receptiveness of all stakeholders to other stakeholders knowledge can
be explained by many of the group theory constructs. There is more
discussion etc and this can be found on the site. Again it was
intended as exploratory but it was a fine detailed examination of
interactions - there were a number of issues identified for further
exploration.
http://www.ausi.com.au/klondon/index.html
I have presented some further work at the last CIB Architectural
Management conference in Hong Kong which is now being considered for
publication which explores design knowledge management concepts.
Kerry London
Senior Lecturer
School of Architecture and Built Environment
Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment
email: [log in to unmask]
tel:+61 2 49215778
http://www.ausi.com.au/klondon/index.html
|
