Post Occupancy Evaluations

At Edmiston Jones we pride ourselves on listening carefully to our clients’ needs and desires - and delivering outcomes best  suited to those needs. How do we reduce the gap between the intention behind a design and actual outcomes? Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE), is an extremely useful process for building users, owners and the team of people involved in the delivery of projects. An Edmiston Jones Post Occupancy Evaluation service can find out what works and what doesn’t work for your project, after the project is completed. Building walkthroughs, roundtable discussions and basic questionnaires are simple ways to share information that can help everyone use their spaces better and can help us to design better spaces. POE is not just about measuring technical data like energy use. Every project has priority goals that can be measured and their value demonstrated. POE can show how well a business performs in their new office, how many connections are made by new residents in a community, how many meals sold in a new club restaurant, or reductions in stress levels of women giving birth. As an example, an evaluation of a new school learning space could help identify and provide evidence of the value in investing in design. Educational outcomes, teacher productivity, cost of occupation and maintenance are major priorities for these spaces. An Edmiston Jones, Post occupancy evaluation could keep track of any number of factors including running costs, usable hours per room (flexibility), air quality, natural light, sound levels, academic offerings, enrolments, bullying, mental health levels, teacher stress levels, temperature levels, comfort, building management system operation refinement, project life-cycle, green infrastructure, community connection, skill sharing, recycling, transport use, waste, staff productivity, behaviour. Teachers and students could use this information to make their spaces work better. School administrators could use this information for cost minimisation and demonstrating the value of their investments. The project team could use the information to provide better designs in the future. Which areas in your project could be improved by an Edmiston Jones’ POE?