Abstract

Designing contemporary bioscience architecture now often centres on ‘designing in’ collaborative atmospheres and informal interaction, to inspire and speed up new multi-disciplinary science work. The architecture, charged with intentions developed by the design team of client and architects, experiments with the culture of science with aims to change scientists’ everyday interactional practices, their informal interactions. What do architects and design teams think they are doing during design with regard to users and informal interaction? What do scientists do all day? What of benefit to designers, researchers and humans who use buildings emerges from comparing design intentions to the everyday practices of scientists? What kind of relationship between design intent and user experiences can we see in practice and can we theorise it?

I undertook a multi-site, multi-modal, multi-year ethnography of several bioscience buildings to explore these questions, in contrast to more common methods. This talk centres on one site of study, a prominent University laboratory in the USA . The point of the talk is to ask the audience a question: what is your level of interest (from whatever your disciplinary perspective) in three test conclusions derived from jointly analysing the two sets of data, on design intent and on users’ experiences?