Jinoh Park
Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is often framed as a building-performance or user-feedback tool. In healthcare settings, however, post-occupancy knowledge extends across clinical priorities, patient experience, operational demands, service delivery, spatial intentions, and community health relations, often without a shared language for interpretation. This paper argues that POE can be understood not only as an evaluative method, but also as a regional learning infrastructure that links healthcare practice, design research, and pedagogy.
Rather than reporting outcomes from a single-site empirical study, the paper offers a case-informed methodological reflection grounded in emerging healthcare, wellness, and design collaborations in Northwest Arkansas. These collaborations involve a regional health research organisation, local architecture firms, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), and health-focused design education at the University of Arkansas. Because some collaborations involve confidential or developing projects, the paper uses an anonymized composite illustration to show how a healthcare arrival, waiting, and orientation sequence may be interpreted differently across clinical, operational, experiential, design, and educational perspectives.
The paper also introduces a service design perspective to connect spatial evaluation with service delivery and user experience. In this framing, POE can examine not only how occupied environments perform spatially, but also how spatial conditions interact with service encounters, user journeys, staff routines, and institutional processes. POE materials can then be translated into teaching resources that expose competing criteria, situated judgments, and different forms of expertise rather than presenting environmental findings as fixed conclusions.
By reframing POE as a regional learning infrastructure, this paper extends POE beyond post-occupancy assessment and positions plural perspectives as resources for systemic inquiry. It also proposes a pedagogical pathway through which regional research partnerships can support collective learning across healthcare practice, design research, and the education of future designers.
Keywords: post-occupancy evaluation, healthcare design, systemic design, regional learning infrastructure, design pedagogy, pluralism, translational practice