If you're in the health care industry, you're probably familiar with the term "evidence-based design." If you're not (in the health care industry or familiar with the term), it refers to studying how facility strategies, like centralized nursing stations and single-patient rooms, can affect both patient outcomes and worker productivity.
Lately, however, the field of evidence-based design is expanding into other vertical markets. And this transition is a subject of a research project by the editors of Building Operating Management. We're looking into how everything from green operational strategies to hotelling policies can affect worker productivity. Often times, we're finding, facility executives are employing evidence-based design strategies - or studying strategies with a "before/after" mindset - even though they may not necessarily call it evidence-based design.
We're hoping to hear from the MyFN community. Are you studying a particular strategy you've employed in your non-health care facilities that you expect to have a particular outcome? Could we contact you as a source for our article? Please comment below - we look forward to hearing from you!
We have been dealing with occupancy research and building performance since the 70's as the nation's only multi-disciplinary architectural consulting lab. in 1998, we founded a national workplace research group, called the Open Plan Working Group(OPWG), and in 2008, we founded an architectural research group called the Architectural Research Consortium(ARC). This was founded to support evidence based design. For many years, we have acted as owners reps and on architectural design teams to represent building performance and occupancy research. Our experience would suggest that about 1% of architecture is seriously interested in EBD and that most facilities managers and clients do not know of the concept, outside of the medical field, where it is quite popular, but not very well practiced.
I would be pleased to discuss this with you in more detail. I posted two notices on this site with regard to one of our research meetings and regarding ARC.
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