Towards a Poe Paradigm

Abstract

In order for post-occupancy evaluation (POE) to become an accepted and standard part of research and design practice, POE professionals must reach agreement on what POEs comprise. This chapter describes six areas for agreement, employing the Hospital POE Program of the Canadian Department of Health and Welfare (BDI, 1988) to demonstrate these six components in practice. The Hospital POE Program:

• 1. Establishes a standardized POE methodology including sequencing, methods, and data gathering;

• 2. Institutionalizes POE in a large and diverse Federal-Provincial health care bureaucracy;

• 3. Creates a POE database to aid in the development of design standards and guidelines, to improve planning and design decision making, and to set capital funding priorities for new construction and renovation; and

• 4. Shares the POE approach explicitly and in detail with both the client group and their consultants who will carry out future POEs, and with the rest of the POE professional community.