End-User Stakeholder Engagement in Refurbishment Design in Higher Education

ABSTRACT

The refurbishment of building facilities needs to incorporate end-user engagement to ensure refurbished building facilities outcomes that include user-responsive learning spaces and satisfy users’ learning needs. However, existing refurbishment design process frameworks neglect to show the engagement process. A new framework for engaging end users in the refurbishment design of building facilities in higher education is presented. A qualitative research methodology was employed to obtain and analyse interview data from twenty-one design team stakeholders involved in two cases of refurbished building facilities in higher education institutions in Australia and New Zealand. The findings revealed four core themes which indicate the context and phases in the refurbishment design process where end-user engagement should be taken seriously. They are the higher education context, early design, user engagement in the design process and post-design phases. In addition, the findings revealed six specific strategies for end-user engagement in the refurbishment design of building facilities in higher education institutions. They are identifying stakeholder value systems, capturing end-user needs, communicating and integrating. Others are the setting of engagement boundaries and surveying of end users. This study modified the project heartbeat originally developed by Stanford University in 2010 for the refurbishment design process in a higher education context. The new framework bridges the gaps in the current literature between stakeholder theory and refurbishment design, and, by incorporating the refurbishment design processes, the framework can be employed in wider education and other project contexts to facilitate the balanced involvement of end users.