Pre and Post Occupancy Evaluations  

Team: Noor Abdelhamid & Mady Gulon (student researchers), Cara Prosser & Donovan Nelson (Perkins&Will advisors), Julia Robinson (faculty advisor)

Program: MSRP, Perkins&Will

How can pre and post occupancy methods be incorporated as a more frequent, normative practice in the design process?

A dialogue between designer and user is constructed across multiple phases of the architectural design process. Traditionally, this dialogue is bounded within a preliminary phase of determining design intent, and concludes when the project is handed off to the client. An alternative process could extend this dialogue through the implementation of pre- and post-occupancy evaluations (PPOEs).

A post-occupancy evaluation (POE) will be performed at a Minneapolis clinic that underwent a pre-occupancy evaluation (Pre-OE) at a previous location several years prior. The pre and post results of the PPOE will be compared and may help gauge to what extent the user-informed design intent was achieved.

Learning from the research process will inform speculative updates to an existing, internal PPOE Toolkit. The resource is intended to foster the inclusion of PPOEs into the standard design process.