(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)
Abstract
People spend a significant amount of time at workplaces consisting of physical and social components, such as the layout, furniture, equipment, organizational culture, and workplace employee relations. Combining these components result in a unique atmosphere that we experience and affects our human physical activities at the workplace. These activities at the workplace are categorized as employee behavioral patterns. The atmosphere is not static and varies over time; therefore, so will our behavioral patterns. Behavioral patterns contain valuable information representing parts of the workspace’s atmospheric heritage and representing both tangible and intangible elements. Such insights enable interior designers to attain a historical understanding of people’s behavior affected by a workspace environment’s physical and social components over a given time. Advanced data analysis of basic sensor data provides a statistically significant quantitative profiling of how employees utilize the various workspaces, including their private desk spaces and common areas such as meeting rooms and lounges. Registering the physical components of the spaces, collecting the subjective social opinions through questionnaires, and linking these to behavioral patterns offer an unseen opportunity to understand the cultural atmosphere over time and what components can affect our experience and behavior. A technical representation enables future interior design predictions that are more likely to predict user needs. The historical heritage can thereby be archived and utilized to improve future user experiences. This paper presents a proof-of-concept tested technological approach to capture and archive the atmospheric state and the behavioral culture in an office-related workplace. A technical representation based on discrete non-invasive and non-person sensitive sensors monitors at all relevant workspaces (75 individual desks and 14 common areas) generates observations consistently 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The paper is based on a study completed over eight weeks and observing approximately one hundred office-based employees.
Andrew Khoudi is a third-year industrial Ph.D. student at Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark, and industrial sponsor Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects and Soren Jensen Consulting Engineers. The candidate’s academic background is within signal processing, and before commencing the Ph.D. program, Andrew Khoudi spends nearly ten years in the industry. Initially, Andrew Khoudi joined a consulting engineering company for six years. The main task was planning and designing large Danish hospitals. This was done in close collaboration with architects, which allowed the candidate to establish an in-depth understanding of the architects’ work methods and culture. Afterward, four years were spent at a tech start-up developing sensors and analyzing data to quantify human behavior in indoor spaces to improve the user experience. Primary spaces to be monitored and analyzed were learning environments such as universities and public schools. As an alternative Ph.D. student within the architectural environment, the candidate aims to research methods making the architectural design process of indoor spaces more data-driven. The main focus of the research is to enable the use of sensors and algorithms to extract information on human behavior and how to improve the user experience by adjusting the interior space design.
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Thursday 16th June, 2022