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This Pecha-Kucha presentation is not exactly about the phenomena I’m studying in my PhD, but a reflection about the conditions where I’m producing my research. Although I’m located in a Engineering Faculty, I try as much as possible to leave space for Art in in my work activity.

This building at the University of Twente campus is being retrofitted to host a medical imaging center.

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Two different hospitals are going to share the facility, together with the University. A workshop was organized with the hospitals to check the spatial plan, but there were many uncertainties about how the activities will use and share space. A mean to visualize activity over space was missing.

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After the workshop, this BIM Application was developed to visualize activities over space. It consists of a plugin for Revit which allows drawing the walking paths of people pursuing a certain action in the workflow.

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The visualization technique was inspired by eye-tracking studies, which also uses lines to trace movements and bubbles for stop times.

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While developing the application I made many visual experiments following my aesthetical feeling. This experiment with random numbers for stop times helped seeing that transparency came to a great advantage for the bubbles.

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After the activities were overlaid on space, came the question of time and costs. I started experimenting with Navisworks to check what was possible with 4D simulation. In this one, it’s possible to see which facility is being used by different functions, their operational costs and income.

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I finally managed to import the paths drawn on Revit in Navisworks, so I could make a 4D simulation of them, using the walking time calculated by Revit. The simulation shows when each path is activated in a shedule.

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Navisworks is mainly used for clash detection between construction elements, but here I used them for identifying clashes between activities on the schedule, for instance, contagious patient walking nearby another patients. The simulation detects the precise moment in the schedule when this can happens. Identifying events that depends both on space and time is very difficult without simulation.

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Looking for other approaches for visualizing activity and space I found Spatial Syntax theory, which underpins the visualization software DepthmapX. It generates axial lines on the spatial layout and measures the connectivity of the lines, indicating by the color red the most connected parts of the layout and by the blue collor the least connected.

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An interesting finding is that the stop times (bubbles) defined facility design matches the least connected places of the facility, what reinforces the Spatial Syntax theory. The theory says that usually people stay longer in the deepest parts of a building.

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DepthmapX can simulate visibility across corridors and rooms. This could have been used to deal with the problem of patients that needs to undress and walk from the dressing rooms to the scanning room without being seen.

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The agent-based simulator generate random actors walking across the facility. This is not accurate of real behavior, since people on the facility follow certain goals, but it helps to consider paths that haven’t been thought about before, paths that doens’t follow a prescribed procedure.

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Like in art, many of the experiments I make do not follow a clear goal, they follow my curiosity and aesthetical feeling. But I do have an overal goal.

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My goal is to support healthcare expansion. The usual pattern is that spatial expansion happens only after care capacity has been expanded to the limits at the expenses of work conditions. My hypothesis is that by having tools for visualizing activity and space it’s possible to adjust them to prevent worsening work conditions.

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With proper design tools, it is possible to intensify the dialectics between space and activity, what we call dialectical designing.

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We tested this hypothesis with facility design students and they started to design space and activity together. The animation binds snapshots of different moments in the evolution of one student design. He changed space, changed activities, then changed space, in a dialectical cycle.

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Most students moved the reception closer to the entrance. The ambiguity of the original position can be seen in this 3D render made by the architect. Is the reception down the corridor or on the right side? The deep visibility provided by the open corridor might lead to patients walking where they shouldn’t. This also supports the axial analysis made by DepthmapX.

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I also use visualizations to organize my own research. These maps are concepts that I extracted from two books, one about Activity and the other about Space. The map on the right is a PhD thesis and the left, a philosophical treatise. The PhD thesis define clear categories and drill down to the specific, while the treatise have much stronger interconnections.

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Last but not least, I want to show an example where an activity completly transformed space by visualization. The abandonned building became “Big Bear’s hotel” for my son. The vizualization was constructed through our playfull dialogue while we played there.

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