This article was originally published on Autodesk's Redshift publication as "A Video Game Is Overtaking Post-Occupancy Evaluation in Architecture."

A real-time synthetic environments screen grab of the reception area at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust in St Helens, UK. Image Courtesy of Arup

This article was originally published on Autodesk's Redshift publication as "A Video Game Is Overtaking Post-Occupancy Evaluation in Architecture."Evaluating the user performance of a particular building design is obviously a good way for clients and architects to gauge whether their design was successful?or could have been better.There?s even an entire academic discipline called post-occupancy evaluation (POE) devoted to this concept, and Arup is tapping into it with a network of 22 industry partners using the Building Use Studies (BUS) methodology. Too few designers tap into POE, but with gamified simulations done before projects are built, that could change.
Admiralty?station?screen?capture. Image Courtesy of Arup

?Basically, you design the thing, you use the thing, and then you evaluate the thing,? says Alvise Simondetti, global leader of Digital Environments NeXt_work at Arup. ?That process generates concrete ideas for improvement. Everyone in architecture and design acknowledges that post-occupancy evaluation is important so that we don?t keep making the same mistakes. But in practice, it?s not do...