Post-occupancy feedback on schools: what is important for architects?

Feedback from completed buildings to architects is essential to improve the environmental and social sustainability of future designs. The literature discusses the lack of uptake of traditional Post-Occupancy Evaluations or Building Performance Evaluations due to various issues and barriers. In addition, existing feedback methods and formats may not provide architects with information on aspects they believe are necessary to improve future designs. Furthermore, existing post-occupancy feedback methods were developed before current, broader conceptions of sustainability became accepted and have concentrated on some aspects of sustainability with the omission of others. In the context of this paper, school buildings are selected as an initial typology to examine architect’s perceptions of desired feedback. This paper presents a survey of primary and secondary school architects in Australia, asking on which aspects of school architecture they desire feedback. In summary, they desire feedback from users regarding the usefulness, flexibility and variety of the spaces, different aspects of comfort including felt responses, building support for community engagement, sustainability education, and current and novel pedagogy, in addition to traditional energy and thermal performance measures.