Benefits Quantification for HaCIRIC

Hello everyone… I would like first, before diving in the project, to introduce myself. I am Dr. Chaham Alalouch and I came from architectural background. I have got my PhD (title: ‘Hospital Ward Design: Implications for Space and Privacy’) from the School of the Built environment, Heriot-Watt University. My area of interest lies in the relationship between the architectural environment and human behaviour, perception and quality of life. I am particularly interested in situations where people feel weak and where architecture may contribute to their well-being, such as in healthcare buildings. This provides opportunities to integrate ‘soft-factors’ in the wider agenda of design while focuses mainly on the physical aspects of the environment. Such a proposal attempts to take on board the views of several stakeholders and promotes their engagements in the design process.     

The ‘Benefit Quantification’ project is clearly linked to the above as it requires understanding of the decision making process, evaluation strategies, subjective judgment approaches and prioritization systems of different stakeholder groups in the context of healthcare building design and infrastructure.

As a starting point, one of the concerns was (and still) to understand the psychological drivers that make a design intervention/process seen as a benefit, either tangible or intangible, from stakeholders’ point of view. This has implications on how the ‘worth’ of a benefit could be quantified. A deep insight into how human interact with stimuli could be a platform from which such an approach may start. In other words, what is the role of someone’s cognition (beliefs), affective (feeling) and as a consequence attitude in perceiving a design intervention (stimulus) as a benefit? This is an interesting/relevant question that we hope to form an opinion on soon.  

Welcome to the “Benefits Quantification” project in the School of the Built Environment at Heriot-Watt University.  This study is funded by the EPSRC through the Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre (HaCIRIC) of Imperial, Reading, Salford and Loughborough Universities.  

We hope that this worklog will be a useful track of things we have looked at; things we have done; and things that we have invented, all associated with the pressing need to “quantify” the perceived “worth” of the benefits that people associate with healthcare provision; specifically features of the infrastructure used by it.

This is a difficult problem that spans several disciplines, not least architectural design and building economics, but the intractable and oft-ignored (until now!) issues of stakeholder engagement, evaluation and judgement.  These are largely psychological and sociological problems that we need to - somehow - operationalise by means of quantitative techniques, all packaged in a useable forms for industry practice that fit the confines of a delivery process derived from the OGC’s “Managing Successful Programmes” framework.  A bit of challenge!

We’re working with University of Salford and Loughborough Universities along with Health Facilities Scotland and Davis Langdon.  We’ve been scoping the work for the last couple of months and now it’s time to start sharing our discoveries…

The team comprises the investigators (Prof. Ammar Kaka and Dr. Derek Thomson) and two postdoctorate researchers - Dr. Chaham Alalouch and Dr. Laura Pronk.  I’ll let them do their own introductions…