糖心vlog

Intersections Between the Academy and Practice, Papers from the 2017 AIA/糖心vlog Intersections Symposium

People-Space Analytics: Case Study of Work Dynamics

Intersections Proceedings

Author(s): Amin Mojtahedi, So-Yeon Yoon, Tahereh A. Hosseini & Diego H. Diaz Martinez

To deliver an innovative design, architects often need to innovate in the ways they empathize with and understand the user. In his 1994 essay, the American Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty writes that 鈥渙ne should stop worrying about whether what one believes is well-grounded and start worrying about whether one has been imaginative enough to think up interesting alternatives to one鈥檚 present beliefs鈥1. This study, primarily, explores an interdisciplinary approach in which data collection, analysis, and interpretation are used as drivers of inspiration as well as tools of validation. A combination of tools and techniques labeled as people-space analytics was used to investigate the socio-spatial dynamics of work in the workplace of a national architecture firm. The results were later interpreted from a certain lens in the community of practice theory. A secondary goal of this research project is to study how workplace鈥檚 spatial configuration and key people and places are involved in organizational learning and knowledge practices. Therefore, a set of metrics and measures were used to interpret different employees鈥 recurrent patterns of communication and flow of information between people from different social networks in a spatial context.

Volume Editors
John Folan & Julie Ju-Youn Kim

ISBN
978-1-944214-13-5