Gordon Chong and Bob Brandt of Chong Partners Architects shared their progress on their AIA College of Fellows 2005 Latrobe Fellowship research at our Summer, 2006 Tertulia. The Labtobe Fellowship is a prestigious award that is awarded every two years. This research project is a collaboration of Chong Partners Architects, Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, Berkeley. The team is using an “evidence-based design” approach to explore how design interventions affect patient outcomes. Instead of relying on the designer’s experience and intuition, the evidence-based design approach uses predictive knowledge about design impacts on behavior and perception. The evidence comes from precedents: post-occupancy surveys, benchmark and best practices surveys, and from scientific research.
The research is proceeding in two complementary routes: the “Natural Experiment,” and the “Garfield Center Experiment.” In the natural experiment, the team is analyzing existing data from Kaiser Permanente’s ongoing tracking survey program looking for correlations between patient outcomes and environmental variations. The database, consisting of over 100,000 records of every discharge from Kaiser’s 30 plus hospitals, is expansive. Patient outcomes, such as length-of-stay, medication, stress measures, and satisfaction, are compared to physical environmental attributes such as orientation, area, occupancy, floor level, lighting, and noise.
In the Garfield experiment, the team will be testing the reactions of test subjects to various environmental design interventions in a full-scale laboratory mock-up that Kaiser will make available.
Comprehensive notes from this presentation are available at: http://www.newwow.net/members/node/78#attachments
