Practice-Based Research Methods and Tools: Introducing the Design Diagnostic

To introduce a composite tool called Design Diagnostic that allows a rapid but triangulated insight into key areas of a facility combining the methods of shadowing, behavior mapping, surveys, interviews, photo-essays, and parametric analysis to determine key challenges and opportunities for improvement, identify future design drivers, and recommend simple "do-now" changes.

Research-based practice relies on agile and nimble methods to investigate, evaluate, and apply research in project work. This requires the ability to scale methodologies, so they can provide actionable insights in often constrained time lines. Surveys, observations, space analytics, and lit reviews often need to be done in extremely short periods of time. In this article, we share how these processes can be condensed to meet time constraints of project time lines, with the critical reminder not to generalize contextually derived insights.

Combining field research (shadowing and behavior mapping) with user engagement (interviews), user feedback (surveys), and analytics of the plan itself allows designers and owners to understand the relationship between design intent and operational outcome and be resource effective in capital planning projects. Scaling these methods to fit the time and resource availability, and ensuring that results are always reviewed and applied in context, is critical.