Essays on Analytic Methods Applicable to the Micro-Geography of the Workplace.

workplace design;building layout analysis;research facilities;network analysis;Architecture;Arts;Architecture

Hwang, YonghaPeponis, John ;

University of Michigan

关键词: workplace design;    building layout analysis;    research facilities;    network analysis;    Architecture;    Arts;    Architecture;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/110428/yonghah_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In spite of growing interest in the physical environment’s role in better communication and collaboration in knowledge-intensive organizations, far too little attention has been paid to quantitative methods for describing and analyzing micro-geography of the workplace. Three essays in this dissertation explores novel methods for describing a spatial layout and analyzing its effect on organizational communications.The first essay’s main question is how concentration of movement fosters diverse communication in the space. We articulate the concept of confluence and propose a new metric, sociospatial betweenness to measure the confluence of a space. Sociospatial betweenness of a space was found to be positively associated with the diversity of communication partners among a group of professionals in a manufacturing company; in contrast, traditional spatial betweenness did not show such an association.The second essay addresses how exposure between members of a dyad increases the chance of research collaboration. The essay proposes and develops a novel metric, zone overlap, measuring exposure, the likelihood of mutual encounter between two people, based on the location of one’s workstation and commonly used facilities. We collected administrative data on a sample of research scientists working at two biomedical research buildings with different layouts. We found that increasing path overlap is associated with increases in collaborations in both buildings. In contrast, traditional metrics such as walking distance and straight-line distance influence outcome measures in only one of the research buildings. The third essay introduces a novel approach for subspace decomposition that can be used for the two new metrics, zone overlap and sociospatial betweenness, proposed in the two previous essays. Although spatial decomposition is one of the essential processes for the analysis of building layout, no new rigorous decomposition has been proposed for more than a decade until this study. We demonstrated that the new method successfully addresses the problems of traditional methods. The essay introduced the modularity function as a quality function to evaluate the goodness of spatial decomposition. Previous decomposition methods so far have rarely paid attention to the evaluation of decomposition.