Building on Experiences

Abstract

Royal Haskoning BM (healthcare department at Hoofddorp)* operates actively in the healthcare market, designing and consulting within care housing projects. Anticipating changes in the healthcare sector, Royal Haskoning foresees a strategic value that could profit the contractor by involving hospital stakeholders (employees, visitors and patients) in the early stage of the design phase of hospital building projects. User participation in architecture has been implemented but to a limited extent. Compared to user participation in product design, the involvement has many shortcomings, e.g. the user group of patients and visitors has never been involved, the stakeholders were only involved in the evaluative end phase of the building design process and there was often a mismatch in communications between hospital stakeholders and architects. In order to enable the design team (the architects) to benefit from the hospital stakeholder involvement, a common language must emerge which facilitates the design team to access stakeholder experiences and use these experiences for information and inspiration in the early phase of the hospital building design process. This common language should be a commonly shared design language that hospital stakeholders and the design team use to communicate verbally and visually. The common design language is the foundation of the Hospital Stakeholder Participation Method and includes both conventional design research methods (observation and interviewing) in order to obtain observable and explicit stakeholder knowledge, and generative techniques (group session, sensitising and generative tools) in order to obtain tacit and latent knowledge. Implementation of this method in an early stage of the design process would expose fully the hospital stakeholders’ experiences that contribute to an optimal hospital environment. *Since 2009: 4Building b.v.