RESEARCH AND DESIGN COOPERATION 59

0 Are natural and built landmarks utilized to help give individual identity to dif-
ferent clusters and different parts of large sites? (88)

Design review questions included in important evidence-based design volumes
(Cooper Marcus and Barnes, 1999) have no right or wrong answers; they sim—
ply raise issues for discussion. By answering the questions, every member of the
design team gains greater control over design decisions. This holds for design-
ers as well as users and other clients. They all contribute to improving a design.
Users gain a special additional benefit from design review questions. Assessing
how well each question corresponds to their own lives makes apparent to them
knowledge and experience they may not know they have. They are put in the
position not of individual clients being asked to express personal desires and
tastes but of knowledgeable participants whose ability to tailor the research to
a particular situation is valuable to design.

Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE)

Another occasion for designers and researchers to cooperate is after a building
or other setting has been occupied—when it is in use. POEs answer questions
like: What were the designers’ original intentions, and how did they try to
implement them? What is there in the design that influenced use of the setting
in ways the designers did not intend? How did position, expertise, and know-
how of design-team members affect decisions during design? Answers to such
questions can be used to reorganize design teams, improve designers’ control
over the effects of future design decisions, and test theories on which design
decisions are based.

One problem in POE research is how to reconstruct design decisions.
Investigators can better use POE results to improve the process of making
design decisions in the future if they can identify and make visible the design
decisions that led up to the setting being evaluated. If designers and
researchers collaborated throughout the design process—programming,
design, and construction—making the process visible is less of a problem; it
is more of a problem if behavioral information was not made explicit during
design.

An explicit behavioral performance program and annotated plans on
which designers have presented behavioral expectations provide a solid footing
for evaluation researchers to reconstruct the behavioral components of a design
process. For example, in the NIH cancer-treatment center designed with
research, the program and annotated plans could be translated into testable
hypotheses, as in Table 3-1 (Conway et al., 1977).

The more inventive evaluators are, the more hypotheses they will gener-
ate from any stated intention, and the more they will profit from their study.

In a POE of a setting for which no behavioral program or written expla—
nation of design decisions was prepared at the time decisions were made,
investigators have greater difficulty reconstructing the how and why of deci-
sions. The problem is further compounded when decisions were made by
designers who no longer work for the firm, or by one of several unidentifiable