Indicia Consulting
KEYNOTE: Human Behavior and the Commissioned Building

Project Description

I heard a possibly apocryphal story once at Lawrence Berkeley Lab; there was an engineer who claimed that he could design a building, which would work perfectly, "if it weren't for all the people." I used my keynote to argue against that treating your building occupants as 'urban pests' with tongue firmly in cheek. Takeaways include:

  • Analyze past outcomes in terms of your successes and failures
  • Use historiography to assess the mechanics underpinning your outcomes
  • Decide what approach you want to take – are you a top-down or a bottom-up?
  • Is your method working for you, or should you adapt it?
  • Small changes can have large impacts.
  • Piggyback culture change onto technological innovations.
  • Empower local and indigenous solutions.
  • Use ritual and lore to encode information. Invent traditions.
  • Go beyond the visual-verbal; incorporate embodied learning for kinesthetic learners (doers)
  • Pace your lessons.

Project Details

Date: May 2012
Client: National Conference on Building Commissioning
Location: Nashville, TN
Text/Slides Link: http://indiciaconsulting.blogspot.com/2015/01/occupants-as-urban-pests-what-history.html
Accompanying Blog Link: "Inventing Tradition With Your O&M Staff and Tenants."