'Designing in' informal interaction in bioscience architecture: design intent and scientists' practices

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• Alison McDougall-Weil, Engineering Design Centre
• Wednesday 24 February 2016, 11:00-12:00
• Sir Arhur Marshall Room, Engineering Design Centre, CUED.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Mari Huhtala.

Designing contemporary bioscience architecture now often centres on ‘designing in’ collaborative atmospheres and informal interaction, to inspire and speed up new multi-disciplinary science work. The architecture, charged with intentions developed by the design team of client and architects, experiments with the culture of science with aims to change scientists’ everyday interactional practices, their informal interactions. What do architects and design teams think they are doing during design with regard to users and informal interaction? What do scientists do all day? What of benefit to designers, researchers and humans who use buildings emerges from comparing design intentions to the everyday practices of scientists? What kind of relationship between design intent and user experiences can we see in practice and can we theorise it?

I undertook a multi-site, multi-modal, multi-year ethnography of several bioscience buildings to explore these questions, in contrast to more common methods. This talk centres on one site of study, a prominent University laboratory in the USA . The point of the talk is to ask the audience a question: what is your level of interest (from whatever your disciplinary perspective) in three test conclusions derived from jointly analysing the two sets of data, on design intent and on user’s experiences?

This talk is part of the Engineering Design Centre Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Engineering - Mechanics, Materials and Design (Div C) - talks and events
• Engineering Design Centre Seminars
• Sir Arhur Marshall Room, Engineering Design Centre, CUED

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