The case for experiential research

AIA's editor for the Practice Management Knowledge Community Rebecca W. E. Edmunds, AIA, talks to Marsh, an expert in workplace strategy and leader in change management, about what her research means for architects and their clients.

What special areas of research do you conduct? 

We are focused on the human experience of space and leveraging research methodologies from both a scale larger than architecture and a scale smaller than architecture. I would argue urban design has a practice of social research within their approach, product and material design have a practice of research, but the building scale of architecture tends not to.  So, we use the urban and product scales as starting points for understanding how we can think differently and help our clients think differently about human experience in architecture. The urban scale is about everything from participative design to using big data resources like consumer data and social media data to inform and understand an environment’s experience. 

We advocate for using existing buildings and spending time to understand the experience of different environments to inform the next generation of buildings. We also look down a scale to product design to understand ideas of prototyping and digital prototyping, align with user experience design in technology.  
These methods may be used to build a mockup, a pilot, or add a digital layer, either in situ like with VR goggles, rendering, or other means that combine physical resources with digital to test the design proposition inspired by that smaller scale. So, the foundation of our viewpoint in relation to architecture is to bring the sensibility of both qualitative and quantitative design information to the architectural scale. 
 

Can you share the types of methods you mentioned, such as gathering data from social media and prototyping?  

We refer to broad categories, the qualitative ones being workshops, focus groups, interviews, and so on that are typical of architectural pre-design and programming. To that we add a variety of data collection methods, which are all evolving due to the increasing proportion of buildings that are smart in some capacity or another.  I try to simplify how we speak about research, which is more like the science we learned in middle school, such as a science fair project that uses a scientific process to observe a phenomenon happening in the world and ask, why is that happening? With background research to see if someone has the answer, and if not, one can formulate a hypothesis.  Referring to people’s earliest research experiences helps establish the foundation of any type of study.  For tools or methods, we use workshops, observation and occupancy metrics, surveys, interviews, and analysis. But the secret sauce isn’t the methods; it's a combination of curiosity and then a rigorous exploration. 


Do architects or their clients or both come to you? And what draws them to your practice? 

While I’d love architects to come to us, it is invariably their clients that do. We are often engaged in what I call the Scooby-Doo “ruh-roh” moment; something has gone wrong, not necessarily from a building forensic perspective, but from a human experience/occupancy perspective. Maybe things are underutilized, or there's negative feedback on the building or the environment. Metaphorically, it’s a rejected transplant organ, where a design solution has been imposed on people without sufficient communication in relation to a solution that isn’t performing from a people perspective. We’re engaged in, essentially, the social forensics of building design. 

At the other end—the more positive aspect of what we do—clients come to us because they are focused on the employee or customer experience and how it can be executed through architecture. To what extent can we describe or measure those factors in a way that is temporarily ahead of the architecture? We may work at a portfolio strategy level, or an organization is thinking of many buildings simultaneously, or it's augmenting an architectural design sequence. For example, we may work parallel to an architecture firm’s process. The client may ask for spaces for serendipitous interaction; we add science to inform the characteristics and qualities of that environment on behalf of the client but serving the architectural endeavor. 

Do you have case studies of how that research can in turn be used by clients or by architects to alter, amend, or add to what they're doing? 

Client projects are included on our website, and we actively publish the results of our work. We've presented at ANFA (Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture) or EDRA (Environmental Design Research Association) over the last ten years to share our discoveries, including recent work around personality factors and employee expectations in return to office models and early work around occupancy and occupancy sensors to help determine what environmental characteristics people liked or didn't like. 

What markets are interested in the type of research you do? 

Our approach is market agnostic. It's about the human experience of space, whether teachers teach, coders code, nurses nurse; we work in any environment where people are doing their most important work. The physical environment has an impact, positive or negative, on its occupants, even more so if the person is in a building on a regular basis. We tend to be in the world of workplace and office environments, though more as a matter of social network and business than of our approach or belief on how people experience space and how it can and should be studied. 

Can you share an example of outcomes based on the research you do and what it means for users or whoever has hired you? 

In the corporate world, it's productivity. Every client, every building developer, owner, occupier, has their definition of a desired future condition. An academic environment involves the intersection between learning, culture, and experience but invariably involves the connection between a university and its alumni to create a donor network as an academic driver. In office and work environments, it’s the intersection of individual, team, and corporate performance, which predominantly and historically are financial metrics.  
 In the future, every building typology and every organization using that typology has performance metrics. That's probably what's most exciting about different clients in different spaces. A single building can hold 10 different clients, each with a different objective or view of what high performance space should deliver. 

Back to our sensibility that human health, personal experience, and community are at the center of desirable spaces...much of our work focuses on an awareness that humans are sensors; we seek out what works for people, and we avoid what doesn't work. We use this idea as a means of thinking about spaces that are truly occupied and that people enjoy being and working in to understand the characteristics of those spaces as opposed to the world of the workplace, where, essentially, have to pay people to occupy. This idea is being tested today in the corporate sector around returning to the office. 
But even in a single environment within a building—a hospitality or hospital space, academic or a corporate environment—you see the places people choose to hang out in and those they don't. Why do we build so many spaces that we know have undesirable characteristics? Why not build more spaces with features we know people like? In large part, we don't go back and look at how our buildings are occupied and the experience within them. 

Do architects misuse the word “research”?

It's multiply misused, or firms believe research is only done from a technical perspective, or furniture and material suppliers should do it. The simplest form of research is pre- and post-occupancy evaluations (POE) to understand the experience of an environment to either inform a future environment or diagnose a recently completed environment, and so on. Very little has changed around POEs in the over two decades since I finished grad school—the frequency of doing them, the methodology used, the levels of incorporation of POE results into design services.  This lack of evolution would've surprised the me of 20 years ago, who thought POEs would become the go-to approach to free architecture from the Middle Ages. Prior generations of architects seemed uninterested in seeking feedback. I jokingly say it's the equivalent of never saying, 'Was it good for you?'  Architectural education teaches that lack of user feedback to students of every gender, every culture. Instead, it teaches us to fight for, advocate for, or advance a set of solutions without seeking anecdotal research or actual research from a scientific perspective. 

Imagine if medicine were still being practiced the same way it was a hundred years ago? Somehow, we've been able to infuse the industry and education with that sensibility from a materials perspective, but not from a social sciences perspective. It's a similar characterization to saying only nurses need a bedside manner and only doctors need credentials. Generally, when architects repeatedly do work for a single client, there is a logic of, let's go see what happened last time. What has more systematically injured the field is that the architectural industry has had to go after projects rather than nurture, enrich, and continue developmental relationships with clients.  Think of the gender roles of “hunter” and “gatherer”—typically assigned respectively as male and female. The absence of women in architecture firm leadership has meant that many firms are in that cycle of hunting for projects rather than nurturing clients. It has driven the entire profession of project management, which wouldn't need to exist if architects were trained to be good project managers. It has driven this lack of reciprocal and constantly improving relationships with clients, because those individuals who are naturally good at relationships weren't given the opportunity, so it didn't become the basis of practice.

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