IHBC Signpost: Integrating Feedback into Research and Practice

Challenges ahead: collecting, managing, integrating and sharing comprehensible findings on actual performance from cradle to grave.

Buildings and Cities writes:

Adrian Leaman (Usable Buildings) reflects on… lessons for the architectural and building research challenges ahead. He advocates practice-based, real-world, case-study research with a positive commitment of all concerned to qualitative improvement for the public and private good using a more engaged professional support system.

The multi-disciplinary project that gave flesh to this approach was Probe – ’Post-Occupancy Review of Buildings and their Engineering’ (nowadays we would substitute ’Environment‘ for ‘Engineering‘).  The project outputs are archived in the Probe section of usablebuildings.co.uk….

We said in 1999: ’It is vital to integrate space, time and performance issues, to design for usability and manageability, and to know who owns which problems. Often one finds too much concentration on the means (the building) than on the benefits it will bring to the occupiers; and what it will demand of them. Consequently, there can be a loss of grip on overall mission…

… Far more effort needs to go into areas that have normally been the province of applied social science.  These include:

  • practice-based knowledge management systems, tailored to the needs and resources of practices of all types and sizes
  • simpler and consistently reliable methods for performance data gathering in the field
  • new protocols for non-compromising information sharing between professionals and practices who would normally compete with each other
  • public interest not-for-profit institution building along the lines pioneered by Michael Young and carried forward by the Young Foundation (2024).
  • more emphasis on risk management together with understanding the processes of improvement and deterioration in both the historic building stock and modern construction
  • a targeted approach to building briefing, with frameworks that encourage cradle-to-grave monitoring as incorporated in, for example, Soft Landings.

…. It’s time for research funders to reframe their notions of ‘innovation’ to include a feedback research programme.

Read more….

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