This year, post occupancy evaluation has become mandatory criteria as part of the New South Wales Board of Architects continuing professional development. Sue Wittenoom reflects on the scarcity of POEs and their value as a tool for learning, measuring impact, and longer-term improvement.

Image: ABC North Coast News

July is peak whale watching season on the east coast of Australia. Up to 40,000 humpback whales are on the move to warmer breeding grounds after a summer of feeding on krill in Antarctic waters. This year there’s already been a reported sighting of the all-white humpback whale named Migaloo – “white fella” in the language of the First Nations people of Byron Bay where he was first seen in 1991.

One white whale among tens of thousands – it’s no wonder that he makes the news.

Winter in Sydney also means that the 3,700 Architects registered to practice in New South Wales have just signed off on their annual quota of continuing professional development. This year the Board of Architects set out three mandatory areas of knowledge to reflect the evolution of the National Competency Standards for Architects and the National Construction Code. These Architects have just been reminded of the existence – and importance – of post occupancy evaluation as part of the life cycle assessment of a building.

They need to be nudged. A POE in the public realm is the proverbial white whale.  Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect that a candid performance evaluation be shared in the public realm. But we have no data on how many of these studies are being carried out at all. The RIBA’s 2017 paper Pathways to Post Occupancy Evaluation says they contribute a negligible amount to practice turnover. Good architects would love to have a better understanding of their buildings over time but come up against clients with no budget to fund the work. The clients with the most to gain are the ones with the highest stakeholder risks – a building that is new and different – and portfolio owners with the greatest incentive to capitalise on insights.

When clients have a focus on outcomes over outputs, then it’s not enough to just close out the project – we need to test the building’s performance to assess its impact. A thorough diagnostic review will look at both the building fabric and the functional program across time.  The building envelope needs to be tested across seasons for weather conditions, and organisations have their own internal weather patterns – operating cycles that need to be experienced for users to understand and properly inhabit new settings.

My first POE was the detailed testing of Lend Lease Interiors’ ground-breaking rethink of the commercial workplace in Australia Square Tower building in 1995. The DEGW strategic brief gave us a full dashboard of metrics – quantitative measures to track and qualitative threads to follow.  And the commercial workplace business driver gave us the incentive to widely share what we had created and what we learned.

Since then, DEGW POEs of innovative workplaces have incorporated a wide range of social research methods in addition to spatial analysis and utilisation tracking. We’ve drawn on ethnographic research methods and shifted the timeframe of a site visit into extended user observation and shadowing. The SA Water House POE built a statistical model for productivity. AECOM’s London workplace POE included psychometric testing to establish and track the increase in cognitive capacity related to the new environment.

Even when there are no baseline metrics to track, we can always try to understand the difference of new environments on their users. Three simple questions in a cycle of reflective practice are always at the core of my work: What have we learned? What does it mean? Now what do we do? This practical bias for actionable findings and longer-term improvement is the critical learning outcome for both architects and clients.

We need to see more of this kind of real-world research.

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Sue Wittenoom has always been an avid reader of all comments in user surveys. She’s worked with, or for, DEGW since they opened their Sydney office – ultimately becoming AECOM’s Strategy+ practice in 2012.  Now working independently as The Soft Build she helps clients get the most value out of buildings that are a scaffold for organisational change.