Interactive facility management, design and planning

Societal developments show that future demands for visualization can be expected to grow. In many areas of organized human activities organizations may turn away from textual and numerical flatlands, and rely on the convenient and multidimensional digital worlds. Virtual worlds for facility management, design, and planning are no exception, it has an enormous potential to help organizations finding the right spaces that fit the human activities they perform. However, a major take-up of virtual worlds in this context allowing a comparison between present and future, is yet to come. Perhaps such applications, interweaving virtual and real worlds in order to design better facilities are at its beginning stages. One thing is clear: sophisticated applications may have remained absent until today, but it will come to us. Digital worlds start to normalize and the design of organizational spaces can benefit from that development. In this current article the effects of the proposed integration of visualization with facilities were studied in a case study design. It was assessed whether the participants would actually change the design, without data on the organizational performance, and to what extent this affected staff satisfaction. This study however showed no design changes and no statistically significant changes in the affective responses of participants between pre-test and post-test stages. However, in this current case the sample size may have been too small for generalization purposes. The connection of virtual worlds with organizational data, which were not applied in this current case but were in fact applied in our earlier studies, may be vital for the efficacy of interactive facility management, design, and planning. It is concluded that data on organizational performance serve as a linking pin between facility management and virtual worlds. Interaction can thus be improved by using organizational data as ‘subtitles’ which stimulate a more active use of the visualization.


Introduction
For thousands of years humans have commended their thoughts to paper.These paper flatlands have successfully captured the ideas of our ancestors in texts and images, many of them beautifully crafted and alas only some of them well preserved.They are our collective memory.The invention of typography gave a significant impulse to the proliferation of thoughts that were committed to paper.It also allowed for efficient distribution of ideas.The dissemination of reason and emotion had become relatively cheap, allowing emancipation of thought for many.At the time, it was a revolution.Ideas and lines of argument could easily be dispersed and, in reaction to this exchange, agreed upon, disputed, or refuted.It became a true impulse for the advancement of art, science, and practice.
Today, many of us still rely on paper.It is a silent legacy of a historical innovation, spreading out its tentacles until today in our modern life.But the tide is turning.The last century the power of digital images has grown.It started with photography, filming industry, and television at the beginning of the century and in the last decades continued with internet, multimedia, gaming, and other emerged forms of visualization.These developments have pushed texts, numbers, and paper more and more into the background.After the sudden and unexpected increase of paper, soon after the introduction of the personal computer, the influence of images has grown and currently starts to successfully provide societies with a viable escape from paper.Our existence is more and more immersing in digital worlds.We inhabit a world in which such artificial worlds have become of the utmost importance.Digital worlds have become a normal, almost natural, human habitat.
In this context, gaming of young children may not only be regarded as play [1].It also allows them to communicate with their friends and to build new friendships.Moreover, social networking sites stimulate teenagers to communicate within their peer group, regardless of national or cultural background.It is also irrefutable that digitals worlds have brought new forms of communication and relationship building to contemporary organizations.With increasing virtualization of their operations and networks, organizations can sprout wings and serve a globalize world.The digital society starts to normalize.It has become a society with unleashed fun, business, and love, but also with unrestrained hate, abuse, and serious crime.It has grown beyond naivety.The borders between the digital and real worlds are increasingly blurred.
At the twenty-first of October 2008, a Dutch criminal Court convicted two teenagers for theft of virtual goods of another teenager in the online role-playing game Runescape.The transfer of virtual goods was preceded with serious real world assault and battery; an evident blurring of the two worlds.In her sentence the Court equated virtual goods with physical goods, which was based on three criteria.Virtual goods represent value.They are sold or bought for money on the internet or schoolyard.Moreover, the tenure can transfer from one to the other.One can obtain or lose actual power by transferring virtual goods to another account.Finally, for criminal law goods do not need to be tangible, just like electricity and money of account [2].
With this sentence the Dutch Court has broken the walls that seemingly divided virtual from real worlds.It is notable that the judgment was passed on teenagers.These children that are currently pampered with visualization will populate our future organizations.As digital illiterates current generations will stay behind, ignorant and unwittingly they will opt out in the end.In contrast, the demands of future generations will grow.Our children will expect three dimensional footage replacing boring reports, articles, and books on paper flatlands.In organizations their pull for visualization will soon start to emerge and grow seriously.It will appear in the farthest and most unexpected corners of modern societies and organizations.Somehow, these future needs will be fulfilled.There are, however, serious barriers to be taken.
Visualization always has had a great appeal to practice [3].Organizations love it, but in science any visualization is subject to attitudes of caution and suspicion.Visualization is the Cinderella of science: hard to become generally accepted as a solid scientific approach.But this neglect is undeserved.Any visualization may be rooted in sound scientific evidence.By doing so, it can integrate positivist with interpretative scientific perspectives and open up new methods of inquiry for facility management.Moreover, it has the capabilities to improve the relation between science and practice.
In this paper, the above supposed capabilities of visualization will be substantiated.First, we will elaborate on the need to escape flatlands and some related problems that can be expected.Next, the meeting of organization with facilities will be introduced as a domain where our imagination is exercised.The subject of organization and facilities will prove to be a rewarding area for the advancement of facility management in this respect.Third, the meaning of virtual facilities will be explored.Fourthly, the possible impact on participation and emancipation will be discussed.Finally, the supposed advantages of interactive facility management, design and planning are tested in practice.

A need to escape flatland
Edward Tufte was the first to coin paper as flatland, because it is static and flat (similar to this text on paper or screen).In contrast, our real world is complex, dynamic, and multidimensional.Unfortunately, paper cannot display these properties, paper is static.Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information [4].
However, history shows us that emotive and animated images were not always well received by science.American ornithologist, hunter, and painter John James Audubon painted astonishing colored, lively, and life-size series of prints of American birds, which were issued in his famous 'Birds of America'.With his approach he had not only brought the birds alive on paper, but also leading scientists in Philadelphia and New York.His work was challenged as being not objective by scientists from the Academy of Natural Sciences.It resulted in an aggressive campaign to discredit his work and scientific credentials.Our ancestral colleagues managed to put his work on a black list [5].Only in London, he found the necessary cooperation for production and publication of his work.
In practice, the world has changed much.The success of Al Gore's presentation 'An Inconvenient Truth', larding multimedia with facts and estimations about global warming and its expected consequences, shows a possible future that may lie ahead of us.Not only in terms of climate change, but also in terms of what kinds of knowledge transfer an audience expects from their leaders.He showed maps of countries and polar caps mixed with virtual flooding and melting of ice, and even an animation of a drowning ice bear.Moreover, a film about personal life experiences, facts from news items, and hard scientific graphs were cleverly interwoven.All together his presentation provided the public with a supposedly convincing visual scene of fact and value.In interactive design similar developments can be seen, such as organizations using virtual reality (VR) for terminal container simulation creating a vivid terminal operating environment to review logistics [6], product design based on VR, gaming, and scenarios [1], and tools for collaborative environments, real time interaction of people to people from various geographical locations [7].
In contrast, science may not have changed that much.If we try to ignore the deceiving signs of high-tech progress like computers, phones and laptops, many of the then emerging scientific outlets are remarkably similar to the ones used by our great-great-grandparents.With most of us safe in our ivory towers, scientists are still remarkably unadventurous and inept in their alignment with modern graphics [8].Until today, many scientists have largely disregarded the fact that visualization can convey a vivid impression of events and processes.We may expect scientists to be still highly text-bound seldom considering other relevant artifacts, such as apparatus, buildings, furniture, graphics, or computer graphics [9].
So the yawning gap between the paper and the real world remains.On one side we have the world unfolding itself in our everyday lives with three spatial dimensions.On the other we have endless two-dimensional flatlands of paper.Should we stay where we are, representing the rich visual world of experience and measurement on mere flatland with text and numbers?Or should we apply new methods and techniques, ones that perhaps even delude our senses but, by doing so, create new multidimensional worlds?In this paper we choose to follow the latter line of thought.We concentrate on new visualization techniques that may change the way we study organizations and facilities in the near future.

Facilities
The facilities of organizations deal with the mutual influences of the physical environment and human behavior.In many cases it has a focus on the effects that architectural structures have on social structures and behavior.It may also be regarded as an interwoven system of organization, physical structures, services, and spatial experiences.Facility design and planning combine architectural design with organizational design [10].Such interdisciplinary design is not limited to an architectural, technological, or structural perspective.Facilities produce meaning, and may be regarded as an expression of organization culture [11].But such spaces also have different degrees of functionality.It may either hinder or facilitate organization processes, and by doing so, it may affect performance [12].

Visualization of facilities
It is pre-supposed here that the design and planning of facilities is an important management task.However, general managers do not like to make decisions about real estate and facilities [13].It is therefore not surprising that currently experts from, for instance, architecture, facility management, and real estate development dominate the decision-making process with respect to a building's interior or exterior.VR has the potential to capture the attention of other important decision-makers for this interdisciplinary task.
It was mentioned earlier that societal developments are expected to pull technological developments of VR to a higher plane.To our children and the generations to come, VR will be a normal part of their lives.The scene in which Elijah Wood, the actor that plays Frodo Baggins in the award wining trilogy 'The Lord of the Rings', touches the digitalized Gollum, illustrates the blurring boundaries between the virtual and the real world.Agent technology is being increasingly absorbed into the tangible world; it is becoming part of what we all take for granted [14,15].As a result, a new generation of managers may emerge: people to whom VR is normal, and who are spoilt by the hyperrealism created by the animations in the gaming and filming industries.
It goes without saying that in the gaming and filming industries virtual worlds have become visually very realistic.Creative companies, including Massive Software, CAT, HIT Lab NZ, Media Design School and Right Hemisphere, display New Zealand's new thinking in computer graphics, interactive media, animation and visual effects.Classical data-graphical representations use series of still images to depict motion: to resolve discontinuity in spatial representations of continuous temporal activity on paper, viewers must interpolate between images, closing the gaps [16].An application of modern computer graphics, however, allows for motion and real time intervention.For instance, at crowd simulations of the Award winning trilogy 'The Lord of the Rings', animators were able to design characters with a set of reactions to what is going on around them.The reactions of the characters determined what they did and how they did it.Currently, their reactions can even simulate emotive qualities such as bravery, weariness, or joy.These experiences can be used to implant multi-agent behavior in a virtual built environment.Organization science may profit from this advancement by using these artificial life forms in a virtual world of organization and space for a new inspiring debate about a possible future [17][18][19].It should be investigated what hard algorithms are needed as plug-ins to feed the behavior of such agents and where agents can and should decide for themselves as intelligent life forms from which we can learn in reality.
However, currently when using VR, architects hardly ever include intelligent agents or avatars [20] into their VR models and only very rarely do they integrate factual information on the performance of an organization.Just a few exceptions can be found [21,22].In 2005 and 2006 the Virtual Concept conferences [23,24] confirmed that the integration of architectural models, business information, and multi-agent behavior remained limited [25,26].This is remarkable since, as it was mentioned earlier, the visual display of data and spatial situations has many advantages over classical forms of presentation, such as common 'flat' paper business reports and architectural drawings.Connecting visualization with expected human behavior does not only allow advancements in multi-agents (or avatars) behavior in the digital world, but also new forms of participatory design.Theories from different functional areas such as facility management, design, and planning, organization design, organization behavior, culture, marketing, and systems approaches can be combined with empirical evidence, perceived realities and experiences.
In this context, a relevant distinction of sir Geoffrey Vickers [27] between reality judgments, value judgments, and instrumental judgments may be helpful for our understanding.Reality judgments are concerned with what is or what is not the case, whereas value judgments are concerned with what ought or ought not to be.Instrumental judgments deal with the best means available to reduce the mismatch between is and ought.VR has outstanding possibilities to make coherent iterations between these three judgments.Advanced computer graphics, as representations of a possible future, could support organizations in assessing what facilities and services should be performed, added, changed or struck.Walls can be removed, human behavior can be simulated and changed, plants and trees can be added, colors can be refreshed, and furniture can be selected, changed, and compared; all presto.The right decision can be confirmed and wrong decisions can easily be reversed: it remains just a computer programme.Consequently, with these ingredients, a debate about the aura and atmosphere of facilities, organizational change and culture can also be included.Such visualization allows organizations to make appreciative judgments: a set of readinesses to distinguish some aspects of facilities rather than others and to classify and value these in this way rather than in that [27].
In contrast, effective layering of information on paper is often difficult; there are all sorts of unplanned and lushly cluttered interacting combinations turn up [4].Lifting a paper flap, lay over a spatial scene with a before/after presentation of a facility redesign, brings about a nearly simultaneous visual comparison of the old and new facilities exactly in position [16], but that is about it.In contrast, immersive VR in a multi-screen theatre allows for a comparison of organizational data and digital images of existing facilities with that of a new facility design and expected human behavior.This allows instant iterations to be made.In this way the viewers can refresh their minds occasionally, making it easier for them to perform a sharp analysis of the differences between old and new.Such use of VR can be easily combined with complex data, such as organizational data.An application of VR showing a possible future state of facilities and services is a surprisingly scarce phenomenon.Following the argument for visual data graphics of Tufte [8], perhaps the diversity of necessary skills is too broad.It would at least require computer-graphical, facility-managerial, empirical, strategic decision-making, and participatory design skills by a research team.But perhaps there is also a significant timelag between the developments in the gaming and filming industries and science.
Can science use the enthusiasm of the gaming generation to improve the realism of virtual worlds?Recently, the American mathematician Luis von Ahn has shown that it can be done, when applied cleverly.For instance, search engines of computers cannot distinguish between images of a frog and an iguana.Von Ahn invented games, such as the ESP game (http://www.espgame.org)where people associate images with wording allowing search engines to improve their performance.The interesting thing is that if this knowledge transfer is packed in a game, the public is even prepared to pay money for it [28].Perhaps the enthusiasm of the gaming generation could also be used to create realistic human behavior in virtual worlds by making online games of it, and, by doing so, test the quality of the facility design and services and the underlying assumptions.For instance, by allowing participants to navigate through future spaces and to actually use them as workers, customers or general public.Such an approach may indeed have the potential to improve the quality of facilities in the real world.
A major take-up of such developments in multi-agents behavior, allowing both digital agents and human participants to experience, use, and value (changes in) the physical environment in a virtual world and respond to it, is yet to come.Perhaps such scientific applications, interweaving digital and real worlds and using the vast potential of gaming generations are at its beginning stages.One thing is clear: sophisticated applications within facility management have remained absent until today, but it will come to us.
As such, virtual worlds can represent highly realistic facilities of the future without a need of being present [29].In the words of Schutz such worlds project 'the act, which is the goal of the action and which is brought into being by the action' [30].The act, being the virtual facilities and representing an expected organizational future, will revert to present time and present action.It will allow organizations to assess the act and to use action to improve the effectiveness of the act.

The meaning of virtual facilities
I will use the 'future perfect tense' as developed by Schutz [30], worked out by Pitsis et al. [31], and criticized by Kreiner and Winch [32] to position virtual worlds for facility management, design, and planning in organization science.I will use these ideas to present a way in which the essence of the meaning of virtual worlds for organizations can be revealed and understood.Following the work of Schutz we may regard virtual worlds as worlds in which "… the actor projects his action as if it were already over and done with and lying in the past."[30].What organizations can see is a new building and its services.They can 'walk' through that building as if it were real."Strangely enough, therefore, because it is pictured as completed, the planned act bears the temporal character of pastness."[30].This temporary pastness is a mindset which organizations can use to reflect on their facility plans and to learn from it.Virtual worlds allow organizations to create a so-called 'future perfect tense' of facilities, according to Schutz this is a situation as if it were simultaneously past and future.I prefer the terms present and future, because in virtual worlds for facilities the supposed past is still present.This simultaneousness is an essential constituent, which allows organizations to iterate and learn.
From earlier studies [33,34] we have learned that the technical possibilities to make such mixes of present and future of facilities and services are available and can be used.Organizations can not only visualize new facilities, but they can also plug-in digital images and facts from the 'old' current facilities.Imagine, for instance, a virtual theatre allowing a group of people from an organization, which together assess the quality of a new workplace design.They may use visualizations projected on a cylindrical screen by means of three projectors creating one (fused) image of the future.In this case, images and presentation slides can also be imported into the virtual worlds and put on one of the screens, while the new workplace design can still be projected on the remaining two screens.This approach makes it possible to iterate between the digital images of the present situation, enriched with an implant of other relevant organizational and spatial data and representations that were derived from the present, and the proposed new virtual facilities.Such an approach allows for constant iterations to be made in the minds of the actors between present and future.In this way the actors can refresh their minds occasionally, making it easier to perform a sharp analysis of the differences between old and new, present and future, and to determine and express their desires to change the plans.
However, the virtual world of these intended facilities is still nothing more than a fantasy, a highly realistic and perhaps even useful one, but a fantasy: "… the phantasy is a real lived experience which in turn can be reflected upon in all its modifications."[30].Especially these reflections and modifications are essential for the learning in organizations.As such virtual worlds allow organizations to evaluate their facility plans and change them whenever necessary.
In this context it is relevant to note that Pitsis et al. [31] used Schutz' work to track the development of the future perfect in a large infrastructural construction project for the Olympic Games in Sydney 2000.They concluded that imagining a future already accomplished, guides the actors to current action and stimulates them to take the necessary steps in getting there.They also argued that the completion of the construction work unfolded itself from a continuous re-scope of the future perfect; only with some criteria on which the entire project would be judged.Without any reference to any original guiding design, this large construction project grew from only 28 pages without design and without clauses.Pitsis et al. proposed to use the future perfect as an alternative to the traditional project management approach for construction projects.If such a complex project can be mastered only with a few criteria and an imagination of a possible future, then what could possibly hinder an application in virtual worlds for facility management?
Kreiner and Winch [32] warn us that Schutz' notion of human action was only based on trivial everyday activities like visiting a friend and mailing a letter.Therefore it must be treated with caution when applied to large design or construction projects.The reflections on these simple situations may not be 1:1 translatable to facility design.In the view of Kreiner and Winch the translation of projects into reality is never a trivial thing to do.Imaginations will probably always be incomplete and may also be less than honest: it can even serve as a tool for manipulating others.In their view "what needs to be done, and which consequences that follow, will only transpire in the subsequent process of implementation."[32].
For an application of virtual worlds for facility management this conclusion of Kreiner and Winch is, however, in need of some moderation.In this specific context, I disagree with their argument for two reasons.Firstly, the technical possibilities have shown us that virtual worlds for facility management allow actors to experience the future they get, assess its quality, and agree on what needs to be changed, before implementation.Therefore the necessary work to be done and its consequences will not only transpire in the implementation.It can and will emerge before implementation, because virtual worlds for facilities management are in an alleged twilight zone where present seems past and future seems present.What needs to be done and which consequences can be expected from the intended facilities unfolds itself in the complexity of the debate that emerges from organizations being immersed in virtual worlds.In the end it is simple: after a debate in the virtual worlds for facility management there is or is not a desire to change the act with actions and there is or is not a possibility to do so.Be that as it may, the work to be done does in any case not solely depend on implementation.
Secondly, Kreiner and Winch focus on project management "in the sense that the actor imagines the future state of affairs to have arisen already, enabling him of her look back on the present situation and the steps connecting the present with the future."[32].This deviates from an approach in virtual worlds for facility management because for organizations it is not always necessary to look at the steps connecting the present with the future.In virtual worlds organizations just compare present and future.From within this twilight zone of present and future, a spin-off with proposed actions may emerge, but these actions are worked out in steps by design and construction experts.
For organizations the application of virtual worlds rather functions as a black box.It is a system which is viewed in terms of its input and output, but not necessarily with any knowledge of its internal workings.Ashby [35] argued that the way not to proceed in approaching an exceedingly complex system, like a facility design, is analysis.In stead of analysis, the input (in this case the 'old' present facilities) should be manipulated, and the output (in this case the 'new' future in virtual facilities) should be assessed.A process which can be repeated until a satisfying result is achieved.In this way actors may in the end discover facilities that meet their wishes, desires, and hopes best, given the available knowledge at a given time.The work of Schutz has allowed us to come to the essence of virtual worlds for facility management: it invites organizations to make, what I will call an 'intelligent exploitation' of the twilight zone between present and future.This intelligent exploitation, in which it is essential to learn from facts and value of present and future, may ensure an improved fit between organization and facilities and, by doing so, can improve the effectiveness of organizations [12].

Participation and emancipation
In many cases people discuss what only some of them have invented before.In such discussions seemingly dichotomous issues can be dealt with.In the context of virtual worlds for facility management hard and soft are not dichotomous but dialectical, not conflicting but complementary.Just as the concept of holism is blurred with multiple layers, current states can be represented together with future states, fact with meaning, and organization with facilities.VR has the potential to do all this together.By combing these developments in participatory design new knowledge nodes may emerge [33].
In this context it is argued that participatory design gives the people who are affected by change in facilities a chance to influence the design [36].It gives them a voice.What emerges is a design process that can be regarded as a co-operation between all sorts of stakeholders.This design approach can be fruitfully combined with VR [37].Studies in architecture have also suggested that participatory design results in financial and qualitative advantages for all participants [38,39].Generally four advantages can be expected.The first one is that the involvement of workers is a serious design test.The workers of the work floor have the expertise and the motivation to make a serious assessment.The changes planned will affect their future work and not necessarily that of those in the higher organizational layers [36].Secondly, worker involvement increases the organization's commitment with the design [36].The participant becomes a 'faith holder', which creates high degrees of trust [40].The participant also becomes an 'accessory' in the decision-making process.Once the decision is made, it is harder for the participants to reconsider it.Thirdly, the participatory design approach leads to emancipation [41].It allows the non-experts to understand the facility design and imagine possible consequences.Finally, participatory design offers those who are affected by the design but initially not involved in it the possibility to discuss the consequences [42], for example, the workforce and visitors of an organization or the inhabitants of a city.
A possible pitfall of participatory design in the context of facility management is that the debate remains top-down; a diktat issued by the architect and/or the management.In order to make the session run smoothly a facilitator is required [36], a person who is in control of the quality of the debate.A debate should not only include the opinions of the powerful decision-makers.Space for the opinions of the less powerful can be ensured by creating a genuine group.A group where there is trust and that discusses sincere and pure, and in which people have opened their minds for mutual understanding and learning [43].

Introduction
In this study the participatory design approach comprised a session in which experts (six designers) and neighbors (five inhabitants, seven businesses representatives) of the proposed design discussed and decided co-operatively on changes to be made.The approach only included VR depicted in this case immersive virtual reality presented in a virtual theatre at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 2009.In this current study, the organization of the meeting as such and the virtual theatre, the displayed physical objects, and the technical installations were exactly the same as an earlier studies [33].However, this current study did not combine organizational facts, figures, and photos of the current states with images of a future state.It solely visualized different scenarios of a possible future of buildings and infrastructure which were used as input for a free discussion on a possible future.The study conducted at the virtual theatre was action research: the researcher actively participated in the discussion with the participants.

Introduction
All participants were invited to the virtual theatre in Groningen for three hours in the evening.The participatory design session consisted of a short introduction in a classroom, followed by a full immersion in the virtual world, and a free unstructured discussion.The programme concluded with an evaluation in a classroom later in the afternoon.The basic idea was to immerse the participants in the facilities.The researcher actively participated in this discussion in order to stimulate a fair debate and facilitate a critical reflection on practical assumptions or conclusions.

Introduction in the class room
At 7 p.m. all participants had gathered in the class room.Next, the researcher briefly explained the research and the evening schedule.The participants started by completing a custom-made questionnaire about the quality of the design.The main underlying question was: "What is your opinion of the proposed design?"This questionnaire consisted of 34 items.A 10-point scale was used to give a report mark per item.At the end of this introduction the participants were invited to go to the virtual theatre.

Immersion in the virtual room
From 7.30 to 9.30 p.m. the participants were immersed in the design and discussed without restrictions or structures imposed on them; there was no discussion agenda set.Be reminded that organizational data from the pre-test were absent.The main questions addressed during this immersion were: "What will the new design look like exactly?" and "Does it improve the current situation?"The participants made a full screen virtual walkthrough.At the start the neighbors were invited to 'just' listen to the ideas of the experts.Later, the participants discussed the supposed quality of the design in the virtual theatre.

Evaluation in the class room
From 9.30 to 10.00 p.m. the participants gave their opinion about the usefulness of this virtual session.The main questions were: "Did VR change your opinion of the design?","Do you want to change the design, and if yes, what is it you want to change?", and "Was it a useful session?".The questionnaire about the quality of the design, which was used during the introduction, was repeated in order to determine whether the participants had developed different opinions during the evening.In addition, the general satisfaction with the participatory design was measured.A 10-point scale was used to judge this item with a report mark.

The role of virtual reality
The software by which the virtual model was created allowed the computer programmer in the cockpit to create different spaces in real time, enabling the participants to experience them instantly.The virtual model was displayed in the virtual theatre.The theatrical structure allowed the 18 participants to assess the design quality simultaneously.In this theatre stereo images were projected on a cylindrical screen by means of three projectors.The Open Scene Graph Reken-Centrum (OSG-RC) software, developed in-house by the HPC/V, made it possible to visualize the proposed design interactively.It allowed scenarios for different routing to be changed interactively.The projection was located at a position above the audience, like in a cinema.The stereo effect was created with shutter glasses, which could be switched from fully transparent to opaque.If the right glass was transparent, the left was opaque, and vice versa.The right glass was transparent when the right eye stereo image was projected, while the left glass was transparent when the left eye stereo image was projected.The refresh rate of the projectors and the shutter glasses was 96 Hz.This frequency was sufficiently high to create an illusion of three dimensions.

Expected effects of absent organizational data
The approach described was set up to determine the effects of VR in participatory design for facility management, design, and planning.This current application of VR was a particular form of participatory design because the organizational data were absent.For decision-making the participants could only rely on the visualization itself, the explanation of the experts, and the emerging discussion.It was expected that this approach would allow the participants to assess the supposed qualities of the virtual design less critically and also would be less satisfactory than a situation in which organizational data would be provided together with VR as in an earlier study [33].

Introduction
The aim of this study was to determine the effects of this particular use of VR.These effects emerged in the design changes proposed as well as in the evaluation of the participatory design session itself.It was surprising to see that this combination of participatory design, virtual worlds, and facilities, in combination with the absence of organizational data, had hardly any effects on the real world of the participants.

Changes and affective responses of participants
The design was debated thoroughly, but the participants made no proposals to change the design.

Introduction
The questionnaire had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.95, indicating that the internal consistency of the questions was good and which also shows that they served as a relatively reliable source of information.The response was 100 % (n = 18).Table 1 summarizes and compares the results before and after the participatory design session.

Satisfaction with the facility design before the virtual session
The results of the questionnaire before the participatory design session show a report mark of 6.62 for the design.The standard deviation of the mean was 0.93.The design was mostly appreciated by the six design-experts (6.97) and the seven neighboring businesses representatives (6.88), and least by the five neighboring inhabitants (6.15).Moreover, most respondents did not have problems assessing the design qualities in advance: • Six of the eighteen respondents (33 %) could not estimate the quality of all 34 design items (100 %) in advance.
-One expert had problems assessing 1 of the 34 items (3 %).-Four neighboring businesses representatives could not assess the quality of 22 items (65 %).-One neighboring inhabitant could not assess the quality of 1 item (3 %).
• Twelve of the eighteen respondents (67 %) could assess the quality of all design items in advance.

Satisfaction with the facility design after the virtual session
The results of the questionnaire after the participatory design session show a lower report mark of 6.49 for the design; the standard deviation of the mean was relatively stable at 0.89.The design was mostly appreciated by the six design-experts (6.78) and the seven neighboring businesses representatives (6.53), and least by the five neighboring inhabitants (6.21).Moreover, most respondents did also not have problems assessing the design qualities after the virtual session: • Seven of the eighteen respondents (39 %) could again not estimate the quality of all 34 design items (100 %) after the virtual session.
-Three experts had problems assessing 3 of the 34 items (9 %).-Four neighboring businesses representatives could not assess the quality of 7 items (21 %).-None of the neighboring inhabitants had problems assessing the quality of design items (0 %).
• Eleven of the eighteen respondents (61 %) could assess the quality of all design items after the virtual session.

Comparison of satisfaction before and after the virtual session
The difference between the total results for all respondents of the questionnaire before and after the virtual session showed a small decrease in the mean report marks for all items and respondents.Apart from the neighboring inhabitants, at all participants a depreciation of the report mark for the design was observed.A similar decrease was observed at the number of participants that did not experience problems assessing the design qualities after the virtual session.Given the outcome of an earlier study [33], overall the results were unexpected and rather disappointing.However, none of the above differences were statistically significant (Wilcoxon matched pairs, two-related samples, p-value <0.05).In addition, the standard deviation was only subject to minor changes and remained relatively stable.Therefore it can be concluded that the virtual design session did not influence the design satisfaction or the participants' possibilities to assess the design qualities.Neither did it seem to have influenced the internal agreement or disagreement within the group of participants.

Satisfaction with the session
The evaluation showed that the participants were still rather satisfied with this particular form of participatory design.
• Sixteen out of eighteen respondents indicated that the travel to the theatre had been worthwhile.• One respondent argued that the session was not worthwhile the travel; another one did not fill in this question.• The general satisfaction with the visit was an 7.02.
The satisfaction with the virtual session showed a mean report mark of 7.02 at all participants.The standard deviation of the mean was 1.47.The design was mostly appreciated by the seven neighboring businesses representatives (7.65) and the five neighboring inhabitants (7.14), and least by the group of six experts (6.00).Even though the participants were relatively positive about the virtual session and did find it worthwhile their travel, it cannot be concluded that the virtual session did clearly provide a positive and useful basis for a discussion about facilities and the confirmation or refutation of the design decisions made.In fact, it is doubtful if it had any impact at all since no changes were made.

Conclusion
Societal developments show that future demands for visualization can be expected to grow.Organizations may turn away from textual and numerical flatlands, and turn to the convenient and multidimensional digital worlds.This may proof to have an improved fit with the needs of our current gaming generations (which will proof to be the future leading generation of our organizations), and provides more convenience for this spoilt future business audience.Moreover, the borders between the virtual and the real are increasingly blurred.The enthusiasm of the gaming generation may be mobilized to improve the realism of existing digital worlds.Virtual facilities can be packed in online games that may allow the quality of facilities in the real world to improve.Public spaces as well as facilities of organizations can be easily tested and assessed in this way.It was also argued that visualization has significant potential to improve our future facilities.It has the possibilities to support and professionalize the debate between stakeholders and to create commitment to a joint future: an intelligent exploitation on the twilight zone between present and future.
The results of this current study were however disappointing in this respect, the virtual session did hardly have any impact.This was in strong contrast with earlier observations at similar cases, in which a complex system of business performance indicators was integrated with virtual reality [33].However, in this current case the sample size may have been too small for generalization purposes.Even though the statistics show that the results were not obtained by chance, it seems also fair to argue that this current study has its empirical limitations in terms of generalizability.At the same time however, the results also suggest that not all virtual sessions may have the same positive impact on decision-making processes as illuminated in the earlier study from above.Some ingredients may perhaps be vital for facility management purposes.The connection of virtual worlds with organizational data, which were not applied in this current case but were in fact applied in our earlier studies, may be vital for the efficacy of interactive facility management, design, and planning.Moreover, this approach may also have positively influenced the satisfaction of participants with both the virtual ses-sion and the design as such, and their possibilities to improve their understanding of the design.
It is expected that a stronger connection between visualization and organizational data can help organizations to iterate between fact and value, and, by doing so, create better discussions and better facilities in the real world.Future studies should reveal if the supposed benefits of virtual worlds for facilities actually do have a direct causal relationship with business data.
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Table 1
Observations at the virtual session