Post-occupancy services can improve your future design offerings. Here's how.

Despite spending years working closely with clients on a project, many architects never linger after the ribbon-cutting to learn which aspects of their design age well. This is a missed opportunity, says Jennifer Amster, AIA, principal and director of academic planning at Washington, D.C.-based firm Page: “Post-occupancy evaluation is a real foundational component of making sure that we’re design-led—that not only are we serving our clients with the information that we’re learning, but also educating our teams internally so that we can help innovate for the future and build that body of knowledge.”

Measuring project success does not have to be a speculative or tedious exercise. Analog tools to track occupant satisfaction, space utilization, and building performance have long existed in the form of surveys and utility bills. More recently, sensors, smart meters, and apps have been developed to can automate and streamline data collection and analysis.

Still, not many design firms formally offer post-occupancy services. Here, three firms—David Baker Architects (DBA), Flad Architects, and Page—share how circling back on projects after handoff has benefited their design services. 

Why follow up

Firms offer post-occupancy services for many reasons. Mandated benchmarking is imminent in many jurisdictions, and certification programs including the Living Building Challenge, LEED, and WELL require or recommend it. With the recent shift toward hybrid work policies, companies are also seeking ways to optimize their real estate. “People are trying to do more with less,” says Elizabeth Strutz, an associate principal and director of process innovation at Flad. “They have to make tough decisions. Being able to present to their executive leadership actual quantitative data behind the decisions or proposals that they’re making is really beneficial.” 

In the healthcare sector, where design directly affects patient outcomes and specific industry standards must be met, clients almost expect design firms to offer post-occupancy data, says Laurie Waggener, director of research for healthcare at Page. “We feel strongly that we offer this service because it is a differentiator.” 

In speaking with her clients’ transition planners, who train and prepare end users to move into a new building, Page strategic consultant Pamela Jones saw a gap in knowledge transfer. “It takes such a long time to design a building that, many times, even the C-suite has turned over,” she says. “Nobody has the background on why things were designed the way they were.” 

At DBA, principal and sustainable design director Katie Ackerly, AIA, traces her experience with post-occupancy evaluations back to her graduate work at the Center for the Built Environment at University of California, Berkeley, which has offered a web-based survey tool since 2000. Over time, Ackerly has come to view post-occupancy studies as invaluable to pre-design work, whether it be for a forthcoming project with the same client or a new one. “That's where you have the power to make changes and learn,” she says. 

Services offered and capabilities/tools

Flad has evaluated spaces post-occupancy on several major projects since the 1980s, says Strutz, who has found handwritten survey notes in the firm’s archives. Today its post-occupancy services include user interviews, space utilization analyses, and indoor environmental quality (IEQ) monitoring.

“Clients might come to us and say, ‘Anecdotally, we feel like this space is not being used as frequently as we expected, but we don’t have quantifiable data,’” Strutz says. That’s when Flad can deploy its proprietary occupancy sensors, designed and programmed in-house, to complement survey findings. The sensors plug directly into standard outlets, enabling a noninvasive installation and easy removal at the end of a study, which typically lasts between a few weeks and a few months. Data is transmitted wirelessly to the firm for analysis. The firm uses an off-the-shelf sensor to monitor IEQ.

DBA began offering post-occupancy services in the affordable housing sector around 2015. Its tools include a site walk rubric and in-person surveys 18 to 36 months after project completion. During the site walk, the firm reviews living, common, administrative, and back-of-the-house spaces with stakeholders. “We look at how the spaces are functioning not just for the residents and staff, but also for the maintenance personnel,” Ackerly says.

Because residents have already completed mounds of paperwork to secure their housing, her end users respond best to in-person interviews and focus groups rather than written questionnaires. “But when you are sitting down with them and having a conversation, you can ask them 40 questions,” she says, with each interview lasting about 15 minutes. Though residents might initially hesitate at speaking frankly, they typically open up when they learn their feedback can inform future design.  

In 2001, Page, a design, architecture, and engineering firm, began offering commissioning services, which now includes ongoing and monitored-based commissioning. After move-in, says principal and commissioning director Jonathan Vaughan, every building starts “a life of its own” as it navigates different seasons and uses. He and his team help on-site facilities staff dial in building systems to optimize occupant comfort and energy use. As more jurisdictions begin requiring benchmarking, owner interest in tracking energy usage has increased, he says.  

Waggener formalized a process for evaluating healthcare facilities at Page in 2011. Using SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics, she tracks whether projects are meeting pre-design targets on the performance of healthcare practitioners against national benchmarks. “We try to get a full-rounded picture of how the building is assisting the frontline practitioner in performing their tasks,” she says.

Jones created an integrated post-occupancy evaluation tool, which tracks pre-design goals, changes and their rationale throughout construction, as well as outcomes 12 to 18 months after occupancy. The tool originated as a spreadsheet in 2018 has evolved into a digital form on Page’s proprietary software platform.

In 2011, Amster, an academic planner, began surveying her clients pre- and post-occupancy in partnership with a social scientist. Though she has encountered reluctance from some institutions—“because when you ask people questions, you’ve got to be prepared to deal with the answers,” she notes—the studies can reveal shortcomings that can be quickly resolved, such as reconfiguring lighting controls or moving erasers closer to marker boards. At the end of day, Amster says, opening the door for feedback results in “happier end users.” 

Knowledge gained and shared

Though the firms agree that post-occupancy evaluations can be labor-intensive ventures that do not directly generate significant revenue, the payoff comes externally in the form of extended client relationships and internally in the form of newfound design knowledge. “Ninety percent of Page’s work comes from repeat clients,” Jones estimates. Post-occupancy services, Strutz says, not only promote “a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and learning—which every firm wants to do—but it also creates better design.”  

For example, a post-occupancy survey of a University of Idaho academic building revealed unexpected outcomes that have altered Flad’s design of the project’s forthcoming addition. Flad had placed lounge seating along perimeter windows in the building atrium for students to relax and gather. However, the survey revealed that students were opting instead to sit at task furniture at the intersection of two major corridors and in hallway alcoves. “These tables and chairs are constantly in use,” Strutz mused. “Students love those spaces.”

At Page, Jones’s assessments of five completed emergency care centers brought in a trove of data that influenced the firm’s design of a sixth center, which has scored significantly better in a preliminary evaluation of post-occupancy data, Jones says. “The layout is not terrifically different, but the spaces are more refined and the flow has really improved,” she explains. The design tweaks included increasing the sizes of the triage area, medication room, and supply area and decreasing the size of a processing room—and they would have never happened had the firm not collected feedback from end users.

Vaughan keeps his team of engineers apprised of which sequences of operations that they author and implement ultimately lead to building systems that successfully perform as the design intended. “How you are describing the sequence is going to determine how it’s programmed and how we test it,” he says.

Besides internal team communications, the designers share their findings firmwide during lunch-and-learns and webinars and with the broader design community at regional and national conferences. 

Adding post-occupancy services into your firm 

Though Flad, Page, and DBA have established their POE offerings over many years, they vary in their degree of formality and sophistication—meaning that any architecture firm can enter this market. Ackerly views her tools of structured site walkthroughs and resident interviews as providing “a really high benefit with a really low barrier to entry.” In fact, she has shared her process and many documents publicly and on AIA KnowledgeNet.  

Ackerly knows her process could be more scientifically rigorous and integrate more technology, but she’s not convinced the end result would be much better for her market. “It’s most important to have the discipline where you go in and ask questions,” she says.  

Flad has begun embedding pre- and post-occupancy services in every master plan, Strutz says, because understanding space and land utilization and operations is critical. Similarly, as the healthcare sector requires more evidence-based design practices, post-occupancy buildings evaluations are increasingly expected. “We’re going through this effort because it’s making us better architects, and it is helping answer the complex issues that our clients face in the built environment,” Waggener says. The work is a true value add to the firm, she continues, “because we have gained so much from it internally as well as from sharing it externally.”