People-Space Analytics: Case Study of Work Dynamics

To deliver an innovative design, architects often need to innovate in the ways they empathize with and understand the user. In his 1994 essay, the American Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty writes that “one should stop worrying about whether what one believes is well-grounded and start worrying about whether one has been imaginative enough to think up interesting alternatives to one’s present beliefs”1. This study, primarily, explores an interdisciplinary approach in which data collection, analysis, and interpretation are used as drivers of inspiration as well as tools of validation. A combination of tools and techniques labeled as people-space analytics was used to investigate the socio-spatial dynamics of work in the workplace of a national architecture firm. The results were later interpreted from a certain lens in the community of practice theory. A secondary goal of this research project is to study how workplace’s spatial configuration and key people and places are involved in organizational learning and knowledge practices. Therefore, a set of metrics and measures were used to interpret different employees’ recurrent patterns of communication and flow of information between people from different social networks in a spatial context.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.Inter.17.6

Volume Editors
John Folan & Julie Ju-Youn Kim

ISBN
978-1-944214-13-5