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.

1. 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.
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2. This building at the University of Twente campus is being retrofitted to host a
medical imaging center.
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3. 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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4. 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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5. 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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6. 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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7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. 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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11. 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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12. 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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13. 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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14. 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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15. 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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16. With proper design tools, it is possible to intensify the dialectics between
space and activity, what we call dialectical designing.
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17. 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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18. 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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19. 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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20. 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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