A critique of post-occupancy evaluation in the UK

Abstract

Architects are trained to design buildings and the subjective perception of building users may not be easy to translate into a designer’s language. In the UK, the design profession has not fully appreciated the significance of returning to the erected structure to appraise how well it was, and remained, fit for purpose. This paper presents a critique of the state of the art of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) in the UK building procurement process. It is established that despite the known benefits of POE, the culture of evaluating the performance of a building, after it has been built and occupied by users for a while, has not been successfully embedded in the design and procurement process. The authors advocate for a ‘forward feeding’ POE, which embraces early collaboration between end users and designers in the building procurement process, in order to co-create a liveable built environment.