DESIGN-PROJECT-BASED INFORMATION GATHERING

A core set of design-project-specific information is needed to move a project
forward. The data required can be grouped into two main categories: subjective
and objective. Subjective here means tightly tied to values, expectations,
and opinions, and includes things like the aspirations of a firm. Objective
information isn’t generally open for debate—a certain number of beds are
required in an intensive care unit if it can reasonably be expected to break
even financially, an office must have a certain number of four-person meeting
rooms if the client organization anticipates having the same sort of meeting
mix in the future that it does now, and so on.
The design-project-based information required for successful design can
be categorized as:
• Subjective criteria
Aspirations of client leaders in general
Goals of client leaders for space
• Objective criteria
Context for project
Resources available
Challenges to overcome
Measures of project success

Aspirations and Goals
Aspirations are often the star of a client’s mission statement if it’s an organization,
or the forces that propel clients forward if they are individuals. Aspirations
are the reason that any action is being taken. They are the highest-level
objectives for your client, the ones that coordinate their actions, if they are organized. A hospital might aspire to maximize the health of community members,
or to serve as a center for learning and research, educating future physicians,
and conducting primary research.
Aspirations can guide your design decisions in a general sense. An
investment firm that aspires to be a trusted resource for millions of investors
wants to use finishes that are not the most expensive that they could technically
afford. These lower costs help lock in higher returns on investments and
send a “successful but prudent” message to clients. Investment firm clients
also might want to place their office in a prominent location to show that they
are members of a community and use only fair trade materials to indicate that
they are concerned about humankind in general. An investment firm might
wish to provide its phone investment counselors with comfortable ergonomic
chairs and surround them with high acoustics-enhancing walls so that they
always sound pleasant and focused during telephone conversations.
A medical spa that wants to always provide its clients with the most
advanced treatments not only needs plumbing, electrical, and structural elements
that are easy to change but also needs ready access to a training room
for aestheticians and a loading dock for the delivery of bulky new equipment,
particularly if it provides hydrotherapy.
Goals are also closely tied to the opinions of the leaders of client firms, and
they funnel naturally into the measures of success for a space. Like aspirations,
they are tightly tied to the values of an organization. Goals are less strategic
and comprehensive than aspirations. They directly link a space to aspirations
by concretely stating how a space will help an organization achieve those
highest-order objectives. They suggest something, behavioral or otherwise,
that can be measured. Goals are classified as subjective here, because even a
relatively straightforward aspiration can lead to a number of goals, and selecting
the specific ones to be pursued in a space is the responsibility of the client
organization’s leaders.
An oncology facility might have the objective of empathetic support for
patients and their families, which would be most likely if caregivers become
more comfortable with cancer-care situations. That requires extended employment
periods. A goal for an oncology facility project might be increasing nursing
staff retention rates; a measure of success could be bringing turnover down
to 50 percent of its current level, for example. Design implications of this desire
to increase retention rates could be a larger number of restorative spaces for
nurses that are clearly separated from areas accessible by patients and their
families.
If a high school is being designed, an aspiration could be to graduate
students that perform at their highest possible intellectual level and become
leaders of society by succeeding in traditional venues, such as Ivy League universities.
This aspiration could result in the goal of teaching using pedagogical
techniques that are valued in the more-traditional education community and
that result in high test-score performance. Space design can support or hinder applying particular teaching techniques. Goal achievement could be assessed
via the test scores of graduating students, a doubling of applications to the
school itself, or the rate at which accepted students ultimately enroll (yield).
A high school whose objective is to mold its students into leaders who will
motivate others to more sustainable behaviors could require a different form,
depending on the specific goals selected. For example, the goal of educating
students on the science behind sustainability could require different laboratory
spaces than those in the first school described.
When you are reviewing goals with clients, it’s important not to be too
deterministic about the implications of specific design decisions. A space
can support the achievement of goals and aspirations, but space alone can
never guarantee success—that is based on a number of factors. Just as an
ill-conceived space might appear to be a good performer because of contextual
(e.g., demographic, economic) changes, a brilliantly conceived space
could fail due to external factors. That is, regardless of how well-grounded
design choices are in research, a number of real-world situations can intervene
and prevent a group from reaching its goals. Imagine a plastic surgery
clinic in offices that are designed to provide supportive and compassionate
care. Repeat business (e.g., botox injections) among its clientele could
fall after the practice redesigns its space if the economy hits a rough spot,
regardless of the design of the offices. This inability of place to dictate outcomes
does not reduce the need for objective performance criteria. It does,
however, require that performance on measures of success need to be put in
a broader context.

Measures of Success
Measures of success need to be, well, measurable. They are linked to how
organizations or individuals want to achieve their aspirations through goals.
Determining measures of success can be a real challenge, but clever thought
ultimately prevails. Steelcase and its research colleagues, for example, wanted
to learn more about how physical design could influence collaboration.4 They
did research at a client design firm and carefully monitored the number of
hours spent in each project phase, knowing that some of those project phases
were more collaboration intense than others. They compared the number of
client hours charged to each project phase before and after the work environments
were changed and used that information to assess the effectiveness of a
new environment for collaboration.
A restaurant can determine if a redesign is facilitating desired changes
by looking at the average receipts per day or week or month. In addition, it
can dive in and look at what is being purchased at each meal. An increase in
high-margin items that extend time in the space, such as desserts, indicates
that patrons feel comfortable enough to want to remain longer. Whether longer
stays are desirable or not depends on whether the pricing structure at the restaurant maximizes income (revenue minus expenses) when people buy
high-margin desserts or when turn is faster.
An increased number of people gathering/stopping in front of a community
feature such as a fountain or sculpture (e.g., Anish Kapoor’s Cloud
Gate sculpture in Millennium Park, Chicago) indicates a space that resonates
with users—people want to be near things that they respect and value. If the
goal of a public project is to increase tourist traffic, observing this gathering
of potentially local folks is not as useful a measure of success as expert interviews
with convention planners or hotel bellhops who give lots of directions
to guests.
Perceived quality of care among the local community is something that a
hospital might desire, but this can be difficult to measure effectively through
surveys or even face-to-face conversations with local citizens. The number of
doctors requesting surgical privileges at the hospital reflects perceived quality
of care—doctors want to be associated with the places where patients want
to have surgery, particularly for highly elective procedures such as plastic
surgery. Perceptions of care are also related to requests for interviews by local
television stations.

Resources and Challenges
Resources and challenges focus on the very particular situation in which a
project will take place. They ground a project in reality. Resources and challenges
can generally be roughly described (financial, human, time), but might
also be somewhat difficult to quantify. Examples of the latter condition are
the level of access that researchers will have to the ultimate users of a space,
a measurement of how easy it is to navigate through a site (important because
staff turnover is high), or the importance of a need to keep client separated
from others. For example, people leaving appointments with psychologists
don’t want to run into gossipy passersby. A concert hall faces acoustic challenges
and acoustics is a mathematical field generally, but in-office acoustics
are difficult to relate directly to worker performance (e.g., if client management
has decried an “open” workplace environment).
People with business training can think of the resources/challenges
analysis as a project-specific SWOT (strength, weaknesses, opportunities,
threats) analysis. The strengths and opportunities of a project are its resources
while weaknesses and threats are challenges. Strengths and weaknesses are
internal to an organization, while opportunities and threats are external. They
include societywide forces such as movement toward sustainability as well as
firm-specific considerations such as a superstar R&D team.
The resources and challenges that designers need to recognize can be
identified in different ways. Interviews with executives and general employees
will reveal some. So will surveys of the client’s clients or discussions with
them. Talking with suppliers who interact with several organizations similar to the design client can really pay off. Visits to competitors are in order for
many sorts of design projects, and undercover missions to current sites, operated
by the client and its competitors, can be really productive. This might
involve being a “patient” at an emergency room or dining at a café to be redesigned,
for example. Content analyzing competitive advertisements can also
provide useful information. Never discount the value of applying techniques
familiar from literature reviews to market analyses. Any of the research tools
profiled in this book can be used to learn about project-related resources and
challenges.

Project Context
Recognizing project context is important for project success and learning
about project context informs design at all levels of scale. Context is all of the
specific information you need about the people who will use a space and the
situations under which they will do so. It ranges from employee lunch rituals
(e.g., eating at their individual desks or together in a company owned cafeteria)
to behaviors that are rewarded (e.g., employees are encouraged to stay
late) or censured (e.g., walking by other people’s cubicles too often to pick up
items from the printer) to whether people need to be able to concentrate while
they’re in the office, for example. Context is who the users of a space are, what
people do (or want to do or should do) in a space, how they do (or want to do
or should do) what they do in a space, why they’re motivated as they are, what
helps them do whatever they’re endeavoring to do, and what hinders them
from doing what’s desired, for starters.
Context is the details of the key questions:
• Who (will use the space, their national culture, organizational culture,
training, personality, role in the organization or community, etc.)
• What (the space will be used for, furnishings need to be reused, relevant
building codes, for example)
• Where (how climate and culture will come into play, location of sight lines
for good views, what is nearby, and other similar information)
• When (present and future market conditions for the client firm, preservable
history of space, how use of the building varies from day to day or
season to season, etc.)
• Why (the space should be redesigned, it is important spiritually or culturally,
if it is, for example)
• How (the use of the space is realistically projected to change during the
next five years, technology will be used in the space, the space communicates
nonverbally to its users, and other associated information)
When we’re discussing design-project-based information needs, we can
think of coming to understand the project context as a straightforward person/
place/behavior audit. When we begin to discuss social-science-based information
needs, it will be clear that supporting context in design requires attention
to additional factors as well.
Information about context is often collected via interviews, surveys, and
observations. It can also come from archival research, literature searches (e.g.,
on industry practices or corporate trends), or other channels.
The research question you are trying to answer does not dictate the
research tool you use. Common sense and available resources (financial, manpower,
time to project phase completion, etc.) are much more important reasons
to choose one research methodology over another. That being said, some
situations encourage use of particular tools. If you are trying to identify the
aspirations of client executives, it is odd to hand them a survey. In this case,
interviews not only permit follow-up questions but also signal appropriate
personal attention to issues of great importance to client executives. They are
necessary for political reasons. Distributing a survey to all employees is a way
for every employee to provide input. This is really important to leaders at some
firms—an instance in which culture also influences tool use.