The Spaces Between the Rooms: A Post-Occupancy Evaluation of Informal Social Spaces in the HEDCO Education Building
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Date
2014-03
Authors
Gebhardt, Christopher
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Currently the Campus Planning Department at the University of Oregon requires
that most new academic buildings built on campus include a certain variety of informal
social spaces. This is based on a belief that good informal social spaces in university
buildings can contribute to the intellectual life of the university by creating opportunities
for frequent interaction between faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students,
as well as foster interdisciplinary research and collaboration.
This post-occupancy evaluation, developed in cooperation with Campus Planning,
investigates the social spaces in the HEDCO Education Building and evaluates their
effectiveness in terms of how many people use them, whether they like them, how well
they create opportunities for interaction between user groups, and whether they are
actually assisting or enabling research collaboration.
It identifies problems that can be fixed in the short term, and develops the
implications of the findings for the future design of social spaces to improve campus
planning projects in the future using a variety of evaluation methods including a
quantitative and qualitative space analysis, formal observation and trace analysis, an
online survey distributed to College of Education members, follow-up interviews after the
survey, and person on the street interviews.
The results suggest that HEDCO is very effective as a community center, and
student-faculty interaction does appear to be well supported. However, there was no
evidence found that the social spaces in HEDCO are contributing in a significant way to
formal research collaborations.
Description
221 pages. A thesis presented to the Department of Architecture and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Arts, Spring 2014.
Keywords
POE, Architecture, Post-Occupancy Evaluation, Education, Social, Social Spaces, Design