User involvement in building design – a state-of-the-art review (original) (raw)
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From Pedagogical Ideas to a School Building: Analysis of User Involvement in Building Design
2014
This study explores a school building design project, which was carried out in collaboration between school staff and students, architects, design engineers and other design experts. This study aims to expand the focus from regarding the users as information briefers in early design phases to cover a long-term user involvement in building design. The research data cover a period of four years. The data include formal documents of the project; interviews of the users, architects and representatives of the client; recordings of twenty design meetings (design team meetings, meetings between users, between users, architects and designers), and design documents produced by the designers and the school users. The results help to interpret the design process as co-design, which expands the users’ initially abstract and hidden user needs to visible models and designs. The collaboration requires merging of the users’ conceptual tools and the designers’ concrete drawings and specifications, t...
The role of user participation in design decisions
1977
The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which users must participate in building and planning decisions which will affect their environment. By definition, it follows that the users should take part in the design process and should share the design product with the designers in order to achieve a built-environment re sponsive to human behavior and needs. The state of art shows that although user needs have been and still are of great concern to the designers, users seldom directly ex press their needs. Twenty-one systems are evaluated with regard to the specific methods applied to certain participatory problems. Each of these methods is then considered from the viewpoint of success or fail ure. A method is then developed and tested using the proposed Addition to the Architecture Building at Georgia Tech as an experiment. Various user types, as representatives of the future users of the Addition to the Architecture Building, participated in group discussions to establish the goals of the Addition followed by individual evaluations. The comparison between the user goals and the goals of the architects and the Building Committee (programming and designing the Addition) indicated that there were many differences in the goals and the prior ities of these goals substantiating the hypothesis that the users knew their own needs better than the designers. The findings, from the literature survey and from the experiment lead to the conclusion that user participation is a problem in its own right and that the method devised was dynamic, generalizable, quick, inexpensive, simple and effective. Therefore, the integration of the user into the process of deciding on planning issues can be attained through institutionalization of the participatory design process. Hence, the first essential strategy is one in which people are educated about user participation and environmental awareness.
User Involvement at the early stages of Design: A Case Study in Healthcare
This paper reports on the preliminary outcomes of a postgraduate research about user involvement in healthcare design. The purpose of this study is to find ways to promote user participation in healthcare design. A literature review was carried out to outline the state-of-the-art of user involvement in the design process, focusing on its importance, forms of involvement, difficulties and benefits. A case study approach was used to investigate these issues with respect to healthcare design in particular, aiming to understand how designers can include users in the design process and to reveal their difficulties and benefits. The case study was conducted at a Brazilian architecture company specialized in healthcare design. Data were collected by interviews, archival records and document analysis. Preliminary findings indicate the importance of users in defining flows and activities of service design and show that efforts made in the way of simplifying the design representation facilitate user involvement in the design process.
’ Design Participation Tactics: enabling people to design their built environment’
This doctoral design research thesis documents a process of rethinking user participation in the design of the urban built environment. It investigates options for the roles of architects and designers as generators and facilitators of design processes that enable designing with people. Its aim is to investigate the tactical knowledge of participation in design and explore how architects’ and designers’ knowledge can be transferred to, shared with and developed together with non-experts. First of all, the theoretical discourse centres on Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between the ‘abstract space’ of designers and experts and the ‘concrete space’ of people and day-to-day life, in spatial practice. This dialectic model of space was developed as an analytical tool to define, understand and re-appropriate the term ‘participation’ in the environmental design field. This new Design Participation analytical tool is then further developed to demonstrate two contributions of this design research. The first contribution is through a critical assessment of different practices of Design Participation, as first defined in the 1971 Design Participation Conference in Manchester (UK) organised by the Design Research Society (DRS), to provide a new viewpoint to understand design practices with participation. Different Design Participation practices were assessed for their appropriateness and effectiveness within past and current contexts, and in different stages and tasks within the design process. Practices within the realm of collaboration between the abstract space of designers and the concrete space of users were tested through a comparative study of design participation projects in three social contexts: Sweden, the United Kingdom (London) and Hong Kong, in which different social attitudes to design prevail. A rethought definition and typology of design participation was developed based on relations between the two ‘worlds’ of experts/designers and users/people. This new understanding of Design Participation is articulated with a new Design Participation Benchmark and Taxonomy. The research endeavours to define Design Participation Tactics that avoid mere ‘tokenism’ and aims at articulating tactics for a transformation of the traditionally conceived process of design. Through action research methodology, the second contribution of this research is to further define the term ‘participation’ within the greater social context and its relation to the subject of design by learning through doing. Three levels of Design Participation Tactics were introduced which are working with three newly defined modes of participation: Community, Public and Design Participation. The Design Participation analytical tool was used to compare different practices between different modes of participation. The relevance and validity of the research is supported through real-world cases involving co-designing with grass-roots user groups, children’s groups and older users, as well as collaboration with professional designers of housing, exhibitions and other types of environments, and other disciplines such as social work and public policy. The re-writing of the roles of designers, architects and other ‘experts’ in the design process is an important component in achieving Design Participation. Positions on the agendas, methodologies and epistemologies involved in the Design Participation process were developed during this study. ‘Agenda’ refers to how the Design Participation process addresses the social context, reflecting social changes and needs. ‘Methodology’ applies to devising holistic Design Participation processes developed through working with users and matching appropriate tactics to each different situation. ‘Epistemology’ evokes the important question of how Design Participation tactics can be transferred to become a foundation and tool for future development. The pursuit of increasing user participation in the design process implies a realignment of designers’ roles (generator, facilitator and developer) from that of producing objects, environments and systems, to that of facilitating innovative collaboration and creating platforms for social inclusion in design practice.
Design Participation Tactics: Redefining User Participation in Design
Proceedings of Design Research Society Wonder …, 2006
How can users take part and what are the potential roles of users in participating in design processes? In which parts of the design processes can users take part and what are the roles of designers and of other stakeholders?
Collaboration matters - A retrospective of three user-centred building projects at Aalto University
2020
User involvement in its varied forms is becoming a reality in many building projects. The year 2020 marks a rise of service design in the context of building planning in Finland as new guidelines in the building and real estate industries were introduced by a respected Building Information group. Service design is used as an umbrella term for various participatory and observatory methods in the guideline. However, this approach does evoke important questions concerning the different modes of working and objectives of user involvement throughout the planning process in architecture and building. The purpose of this study is to clarify how to involve users and the various design objectives considered throughout the planning process in architecture and building. This study examines these processes within multiple case studies. Three building planning projects done in Aalto University are selected to situate the theory within the practice and to elucidate the complex phenomenon of user-...
Fast growing, the building and architectural industry in Jordan has placed great pressure on the design industry, whether academic or professional. Besides opening student undergraduate acceptance to reach 150-210 each year in most of the 7 old schools, 8 new schools found their way to the Jordanian market. As the number of schools and students grow, shortages in academic resources grow, hence many schools reduced contact design studio hours to two thirds and devised a design students group, 3-4 on one project, which prevailed and in some schools became a normal academic practice. At the same time, schools find no time to develop their curriculums or design systems; they stick more and more to the old classical ways of design. However, change in one part and no change in another part aggravated the reliance on the old design (classical) teaching ways. Both tutors and students thought of and considered design as an exercise in solving problems where programs, solutions, and results are known from the beginning. Breaking through the long stagnant, old design process adopted in most Jordanian schools requires not only change in the ways designers handle the design problem requirements, programs, alternatives and solutions, but also the whole design course of action. Let's not forget the stakeholder's way of thinking as well, which includes: designers are to be involved in writing down the problem with the clients from the beginning; new concepts in design refer to architecture as a book which users can read, experience, and conceive; design concepts are devised from the users' experiences, events, and activities and not from the space requirements, programs, and functions; and finally, designs which depend on designing successful and appropriate events, activities, and experiences are key to any successful interactive design.