User phase experience from real estate and facilities management: How it connects to and influence over the early phase of building design

The practice of building design at large, focuses on the realization of physical features, which are based on different design philosophy and technical standards, creating spaces where different human behaviors are expected to take place. However, it should be noted, as people often forget, or sometimes intentionally neglect, that meeting the prerequisite will never guarantee an achieved goal, though failing to do so will absolutely undermine such goal. Quite often, there are buildings with excellent architectural design but with barely satisfactory user experience. The cause of such divided perception, is insufficient comprehension of the complexity in the interaction among users (also known as occupants) and between users and the building. Understanding the inner mechanism of the interaction between users and the building, and introduce such knowledge at the early phase of building design is believed to have great and positive influence over building design. The thesis features the author’s thoughts and findings regarding how important and necessary it is to adopt a holistic view in the designing of a building, and in what way it can greatly influence the building design when user phase experience is taken into consideration in the design scheme, especially when such intervention is introduced at the early stage. Given this thesis topic, keywords such as "user phase" and "early phase design" need to be studied and explained, such need justifies the approach of literature review. As a complement to literature review, in this thesis, theoretical analysis is used to evaluate different models of early phase influence in building design so as to find out their respective characteristics. Also, to give the readers an idea of how diverse the value proposition for different stakeholders could be, an internet-based survey which collects feedback from the stakeholder's group of owners is documented. Yet, when it comes to more detailed design requirements from the users, interviews are given in one of the case studies. Case study and pilot study are both considered significantly valuable in providing supporting details for developing observations and insights. The difference being a case study must be a project done by the author himself, whilst a pilot study could be an external project documented by someone else