[00:00:00] Alyson Goff: Hi. Welcome to another Bow Tie Tuesday. Today we bring you part two of my conversation with Shannon Dowling, principle of Learning Environment, Strategy and Design at Ayers Saint Gross. Last week we had the pleasure of busting through some common design misconceptions. This week let's get into the topic of post occupancy evaluations.
Thanks for tuning in. Shannon, I'm so glad you're here.
[00:00:23] Shannon Dowling: Thanks for having me. I also feel like I need to apologize to Aaron for living with a house full of boys and not having a bow tie.
[00:00:31] Alyson Goff: Yeah, it's okay.
My, my next question I think is a little comical, but we're gonna go with it.
So, higher ed usually talks about space analytics in the terms of efficiency or cost savings. What's the more meaningful purpose for analytics that the sector is overlooking?
[00:00:49] Shannon Dowling: And I bet you can guess my answer here. I would say belonging, retention, student success. So I think space data can give us [00:01:00] foresight and to lived experiences and how they form communities, how they foster belonging, and how they help people thrive
in this space.
[00:01:09] Alyson Goff: Yes, absolutely. And that's, um, so one of the pieces that we've tried to develop is this belonging metric, if you will. Mm-hmm. How often is someone returning to a space and, and that can have multiple uses, you know, thinking about from a workplace perspective, but from students, you know, understanding, yes this is the classroom proper, but where are they going beforehand? Mm-hmm. Um, like how often are they returning to those spaces? And so I think that there's, again, there's a way to use quantitative data for a qualitative metric. Mm-hmm. So to that end, um, so I, I, I've gotta ask us, even though this will maybe hurt my heart, um, so can you share an example of where space efficiency metrics pointed, uh, in one direction, but your design [00:02:00] intuition or student behavior, the interviews told a completely different story.
[00:02:04] Shannon Dowling: Yeah. And I think we see this a lot. We see these rooms with this perfect utilization, right? They have high weekly room hours, they have high seat fill rates but students never return to that space outside the classroom. And that's what you would get from occupancy data. So everything in this, in these sort of calculated analytics is going yes this room is working and then everything in the occupancy analytics and in the behavior of the students is saying like, no, something is off here. And I think we often. You know, we know that a lot of faculty members have a choice in where they teach, and you know, their choices aren't necessarily always about the affordances of the space.
Mm-hmm. Students don't really have that same choice in where they learn. Mm-hmm. Um, but they have where they learn in terms of like scheduled instructional environments, but they do have that choice in where they learn, when there is no schedule and there's nothing dictating 'em. And so, you know [00:03:00] students are gonna follow comfort, they're gonna follow safety, they're gonna follow, um, social cues. So I think sometimes understanding that data that's not on the fixed schedule would help us more than understanding the data that is fixed.
Absolutely. A hundred percent agree. So putting our, our future hat on.
So, you know, we talked about how. The student demographic, uh, the, the financial picture is changing, but also thinking about, you know, we're gonna start, uh, we're gonna see more students that did a lot of learning virtually during the pandemic, they're gonna start arriving to our campuses. So what expectations or behaviors should institutions be designing for now, rather than in the next five years?
Yeah. It's like, I feel like every answer I say you're just ready for it. Right? Because, um, but I feel like students are already signaling the fact that they expect agency choice and autonomy in how they manage their environment. And [00:04:00] we've actually been doing a lot of, for a system wide classroom study, we've been doing a lot of engagement and we were offering the students, would you rather have consistency or choice?
And like 95 plus percent of the students said they want choice. And so I think like we can think about micro adjustability over environments. Like, you know, can you put, add a lamp that can be dimmed, can you be able to move a screen or a monitor? Can you give students permission to actually rearrange the furniture in their lounge space after hours.
And these small like interventions that we can make will have this have an outsized psychological impact on students. I think another thing that we can do right now is de-densify spaces. And you know, you know that from your work as well. Like you can often take away like 10 to 15% of the seats in the space and, um, students will feel less cramped and they'll just be able to b e more comfortable. It's like, you know, putting on the [00:05:00] elastic pants for Thanksgiving dinner. That's true. Um, and then it's also adding spaces for quiet like low stimulus, low pressure spaces. Spaces where people can regulate, where, you know, um, noise, movement, clutter could all be minimized. And then I think the other thing that we talk about a lot is hybrid fluidity.
And just making, you know, we know that even if part of our day is in person, not all of our day is gonna be in person. So adding places for privacy for that have good power and good acoustic control, and that you can kind of quickly plug and play and adapt into the in-person environment, I think is really helpful for students as well and for everyone, I guess.
[00:05:42] Alyson Goff: Right. I, I was like, you know, I know we're talking specifically about students, but I'm like, this is describing faculty, staff, visitors to campus, you know, all of us. So, um, absolutely. So wanted to maybe kind of switch a bit to something that, we're particularly interested about what does [00:06:00] the future look like?
So traditional post occupancy evaluations have relied on surveys and snapshots in time. What does a next gen POE look like? If you could redesign it from scratch?
[00:06:12] Shannon Dowling: Yes. And I've been trying to do this, so I was very excited about this question. Um, I think we're doing occupancy surveys very wrong.
We're focusing, at least in the design world, we focus on these affordances. Like, did you use the whiteboard? Did you like the furniture. Um, and those questions don't tell us really like what matters. And that's like did adding this space or did renovating the space actually change anything? Um, we're not really measuring impact at that point.
We're measuring features. Um, and what I personally really wanna look at is belonging, retention, academic confidence, attendance, you know, faculty teaching behaviors, collaboration, and whether, you know, a space really did relieve utilization pressure. So like, did the building work [00:07:00] the way that we said it would, and, you know, did it solve the problem?
And I think in order to do that then the occupancy survey has to be multi method. It has to be longitudinal, it has to blend. And occupancy analyticals with behavioral observations, you know, like quick pulse surveys, different environmental data, overlaying some narrative reflections and some like long-term student success metrics so that we know like the place that we designed is really actually helping people thrive. And I think we have a lot of work to do in that arena.
[00:07:35] Alyson Goff: Yes. Lots of opportunity and, you know, so I'm curious, um, so I think typically a POE is, um, one year, you know, um, after occupying the building in the, in this world that you've described.
Well, I mean, I think you touched on something that's really interesting of. How can we maybe quantify quick wins? Um, because we know that the world we live in you know, we're not, [00:08:00] yes, capital planning is a long-term effort, but we're constantly developing new plans or figuring out what, what's the next build or renovation, what's our priority?
So I, what I really liked about what you said is, you know, how can we get something in that interim period, um, but then, you know, still measure long term for really for that impact. You know, so I think it's kind of, to me, what I, what I'm hearing is we need both, we need, yeah, that quick win of like, okay this , design decision worked, it did not work, so that we can adjust because I, you know, going back to earlier. It's not just about the building, it's not just about the space, it's how we operate. So do we need to maybe think differently about how we're training faculty to be successful in these spaces? Um, so I, I think it's just, there's, like you said, so much that needs to be done, um, which is the exciting part, um, because it hasn't been carved out for us as, as a [00:09:00] industry.
So kind of to wrap us up again, this, uh, promise is not a leading question, but I really would love to see your perspective. What do you see as the biggest opportunities for design teams in analytics platforms like CampusIQ to collaborate in ways that genuinely improve the student experience and future campus planning.
[00:09:22] Shannon Dowling: And I feel like this is a little bit of my soapbox right now, but I feel like that the biggest opportunity isn't technical, but it's cultural. I feel like we're really bad at like guarding our secrets. Like designers guard the process and analytics team guard the algorithms, institutions guard their data.
Um, but I feel like the student experience would improve if we did the opposite. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, if we share frameworks, if we, um, co interpret patterns together, if we combine the student narrative with these behavioral signals, like get everything out from behind a paywall and we collaborate [00:10:00] around like open-ended insight non-proprietary tools and just think about like what questions are we trying to answer together. Mm-hmm. And how will we know when that space is helping students thrive?
[00:10:12] Alyson Goff: Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, I think you, for almost as I think the entire time I've known you, I know that's your approach of we're all, you know, trying to solve the same problems and, and ultimately have the same impact on, uh, students and the, and the people who are serving them in those buildings.
Um, and so we'll probably drop some links in this post, but you've just y ou, you practice what you preach. Um, you know, thinking about the playbook, um, the learning spaces education series,
[00:10:41] Shannon Dowling: survey
system.
[00:10:42] Alyson Goff: Yeah. So we'll, uh, drop those things in just, um, to share with our, uh, viewers.
Um, but anything else that you would wanna address?
[00:10:53] Shannon Dowling: No, I think that's the,
[00:10:55] Alyson Goff: okay. That's good.
[00:10:56] Alyson Goff: Thank you for joining us today for part two of my conversation with Shannon. [00:11:00] I so appreciated her insights into the future of post occupancy evaluations and how occupancy analytics can inform design. Thanks for tuning in.
Comments (0)
Leave a Comment