PhD defence M.E. (Liesbeth) van Heel

Below is a brief summary of the dissertation:

Erasmus MC set its strategic goals for a newly built hospital in 2000. It wanted to create an innovative care environment to cater for its tertiary care patients, often requiring multidisciplinary care, that would combine ‘high tech’ with ‘high touch’. For the built environment itself the ambition was to create safe, pleasant, and sustainable spaces. Different perspectives in project teams foster adaptive capabilities to engage with stakeholders and embrace the best available evidence for innovation, thus enhancing interdisciplinary collaboration. 
Between ambitions and realisation, many stakeholders influence design and decision-making processes. This study reconstructs the engagement of stakeholders in the transformative change process for Erasmus MC’s newly built hospital, and it tries to understand the trade-offs based on stakeholder voices during this process as experienced by end-users, e.g. after the building was taken into use in 2013 and 2018. Design quality as experiences by end-users is influenced by the balance between bricks (the built environment), bytes (IT-supported processes) and behaviour (routines and ways of working), or by the fit of the human-building-technology interactions. 
Collecting lessons learned through evaluation research helps shape better (hospital) buildings. However, post-occupancy evaluation studies rarely publish their findings, which hampers learning within the sector. And evaluation findings not only need to be published in scientific journals, but also require translation to project practice and professional practice. This knowledge can assist ‘clients’ in what is often a ‘once in a lifetime’ endeavour and help design teams to enrich intuitive and creative designs with as much information as available.