A workshop exercise run for CABE by Cambridge Architectural Research was part of a presentation to the ‘Sustainable Healthcare through the Built Environment’ conference in March 2007.

The workshop had two aims: to provide a stimulating and thought provoking exercise about design for health care and to demonstrate the practicality and utility of systematic user research.

The exercise is based on research in the commercial sector published in ‘Reconciling the architectural preferences of architects and the public: the ordered preference model’ (Fawcett, Ellingham & Platt, 2006). The exercise shows that a similar approach can be applied to healthcare buildings.

Method
The exercise is based on a simple typology of healthcare design based on two attributes, practicality and design quality, each with two alternative values. This structure generates four design types:

Photographs were selected to illustrate all four design types of the interiors of healthcare buildings. To match each type with every other type required six pairs of images; a total of 12 photographs.

The conference participants were shown the image-pairs and asked to indicate their preferences on pre-prepared scoring sheets. The scores were analysed during the session and the results fed back to participants in the closing part of the session. For the analysis, the participants were divided into two groups – architects and non architects, including healthcare professionals. It was expected that architects would place more weight on the design quality attribute, whereas for healthcare professionals the practicality attribute would be more significant. Did the results confirm this hypothesis?

The expected pattern of results, as graphed before the workshop, are compared with the actual results below. One can see that architects did emphasise visual quality over practicality, but non architects scored practicality and visual quality fairly equally. More significantly, however, the graph shows there is greater agreement between architects, in terms of these preferences, than between non architects. Clearly the architects in the audience are picking up visual clues about quality that are not apparent to the non architects.

This exercise confirms the message that user research can be a practical tool. The discrepancy between architect and user preferences in health care design is one of a very wide range of situations in which user research can be applied. We don’t need to guess about the underlying factors affecting people’s preferences – with well structured research, we can find out.