Empathetic design and post‐occupancy evaluation

This paper describes a case study evaluation of an innovative educational facility at the University of Reading, designed by the American modernist architect, Rick Mather. The paper presents some conceptual concerns regarding “inquiry” based evaluation and advocates the use of “empathetic” evaluation currently practised in other industries. Questionnaire based approaches throw little light on the impact of building design on new workplace practices currently being experimented with in intelligent office buildings. Empathetic evaluation may help to redress this.