No abstract

Social housing (SH) upgrades involve multiple stakeholders with sometimes divergent requirements and needs. Collaboration and participative processes are essential to ensuring an appropriate value for users is delivered through social housing upgrades. Living Labs are user-centred initiatives where researchers, public and private partners, and users collaborate to develop innovative solutions in real-live environments. However, scarce research exists on how Living Labs may support the upgrading of social housing, and there is a need to explore what the challenges are that can be expected in this context. This paper discusses an integrative literature synthesis of housing upgrades developed within the context of Living Labs. Nine information-rich cases identified in the literature were chosen for in-depth examination. A living lab process was proposed based on the literature and activities and tools used in Living Labs were identified. From the challenges highlighted by existing studies, a series of recommendations to support the development of Living Labs in social housing upgrades was proposed. These should support Living Labs implementation initiatives in this specific context.

This paper proposes a set of guidelines for using Building Information Modelling (BIM) to manage client requirements in the context of social housing projects. A process model representing main activities involved in requirements management has been devised, as well as nine constructs that can be used for assessing the effectiveness of using BIM for client requirements management. The process of managing and modelling clients’ requirements is important to improve value generation, considering the limited resources usually available for social housing projects, as well as the need to deal with the diversity of user profiles. The use of BIM-based tools to support this process can potentially improve the performance of those projects in terms of environmental and social sustainability. Design Science Research was the methodological approach adopted in this investigation. The main outcome of this study, the set of guidelines, emerged from an empirical study carried out in a social housing project from Brazil. This study explores the managerial perspective of client requirements modelling, proposing practical contributions, such as understanding the challenges of managing requirements in social housing projects, and theoretical contributions, such as descriptions of the activities involved in client requirements management and their interactions, and constructs for assessing BIM-based solutions for that problem.

Healthcare projects are known for having a high degree of complexity. Furthermore, the design of healthcare facilities is highly constrained by regulations containing a wide range of requirements. Using BIM for automated rule checking has been pointed out as an opportunity to improve requirements management in these projects. However, most existing research is focused on hard-coded approaches or on limited sets of requirements. The aim of this investigation is to propose a semantic-based framework for automated rule checking in the context of healthcare design. An empirical study was conducted in the redevelopment of a university hospital, using Design Science Research as a methodological approach. Results indicate that the nature of regulations and the subjectivity of requirements have a major impact on the possibility of their translation into logical rules, which is needed to enable automated checking. The main theoretical contribution is a taxonomy for automated rule checking and information transformation.

The UK government made significant commitments to upgrading the energy efficiency of seven million British homes by 2020, aiming at reducing carbon emissions and addressing fuel poverty. One alternative to achieve better energy performance in existing houses is retrofit. However, there are difficulties associated with retrofitting social housing. It is currently challenging to compare scenarios (retrofit options) considering costs, potential energy efficiency gains, and at the same time minimising disruption to users. This paper presents a Building Information Modelling (BIM) protocol aimed to support decision making by social housing owners. It adopts BIM to simulate alternative retrofit options, considering: (a) potential reductions in energy consumption, (b) 4D BIM for retrofit planning and reduction of users’ disruption and (c) simulation of costs. A what-if scenario matrix is proposed to support decision making in the selection of social housing retrofit solutions, according to client and users’ needs. A case study of the retrofit of a mid-terrace house is presented to demonstrate the workflow. The main output of the work is the BIM protocol, which can support client decision making in diverse social housing retrofit projects, considering all three elements (energy simulation, planning for reduced disruption and cost estimation) in an integrated fashion. Such an integrated approach enables clients to make better informed decisions considering diverse social housing retrofit options through a simple process using readily available BIM technology.

It is well known that the quality of healthcare facilities can contribute to health and wellbeing. Healthcare design is complex due to the large amount of information involved, with sometimes conflicting requirements which evolve over time. Therefore, strategies to deal with such complexity and volume of information is key. These include requirements from clients, stakeholders and regulations, structuring and storing design data and also verifying if design solutions are compliant to the briefing and to the regulatory framework. Despite the reported benefits of BIM, there are still gaps on the use of BIM tools in practice to support healthcare design. The aim of this paper is to discuss the benefits and limitations of commercially available BIM tools to support requirements management in general, and rule checking (also refered to as code checking, i.e. regulatory compliance checking) specifically. Design Science Research is the method adopted in this investigation. An empirical study was conducted in collaboration with an institution responsible for Primary Healthcare buildings in the UK. The results discuss the role that two tools (dRofus and Solibri Model Checker) have in supporting requirements management and code checking in healthcare design, their benefits and limitations. A framework is proposed, exploring relationships between the main features of the two BIM tools addressed in this paper and their potential impact on healthcare design. This paper demonstrates that improvements in healthcare design can be achieved by using BIM tools, which might benefit the quality of buildings designed and built, leading to positive health outcomes.

Living Labs (LLs) consist of social and dynamic environments that enable end-users and stakeholders to collaborate towards an innovation. This paper presents the concept of LLs and analysis on how it can foster communication and collaboration from a lean perspective. Key concepts, such as co-creation, common ground, shared understanding and boundary objects are discussed in relation to LLs. The paper highlights the synergies between LLs and lean, including the focus on users' needs and values, the use of participatory approaches and early inclusion of stakeholders in the decision-making process, for example. There is however lack of clarity in the literature regarding the concept of LLs and, hence, there is a need for future empirical research to enable a better understanding of the synergies between Living Labs and lean.

Healthcare facilities are well known for their complexity. Frequent changes in healthcare processes, as well as the introduction of new technologies, demand changes in the internal layout and in the performance of buildings. Moreover, there are several stakeholders involved, with distinct and sometimes conflicting requirements, including medical staff, patients, visitors, cleaning and maintenance teams, among others. Some of those requirements have been translated into a complex set of norms and regulations. This paper reports the initial results of an ongoing investigation that has explored opportunities for improving value generation in the design and installation of healthcare facilities by using BIM and Lean concepts. The aim of this study is to understand how user requirements can be modelled to support decision making in the design process. Modelling requirements involves several steps: identification, structuring, establishing priorities, translating and representing in a BIM model. It depends not only on the individual user requirements but also on how some critical healthcare processes have been defined. The main contributions of this paper are concerned with the definition of how different types of requirements can be modelled to support the assessment of the healthcare building designs.