Value-engineering with over-priced flourishes.

You'll be hard pressed to find any examples about this other than hospitals.

i think it is a frontier. On the one hand, there is a recognition that to have the sort of interactive, intelligent, responsive, high-performance environments that everyone now discusses, we have to know how environments perform to a high fidelity, in real-time, and we have to be able to predict how they will perform when we design new ones or when we introduce variance into existing systems.

Currently, we are very poor at accomplishing these tasks and are just now developing the tools and methods, but they are in fledging states and not very reliable. When these methods and instruments break down, we are right back to intuition and experience.

Buildings are complex systems. Traditional engineering and HCI methods attempt to decompose the problem into elemental parts before composing the system. This works for simple systems, such as many simple consumer products. But with complex systems, the interactions between elements may dictate the characteristics and performance of the system more than the functionality of any individual elements or sets of elements. Decompositional strategies currently do a poor job of identifying and properly characterizing the interaction effects.

Architectural design processes, in the traditional sense, are very good at accounting for interaction effects b/c we do not decompose until the concepts are developed --- the inverse of what engineers and HCI people generally do. But the downside to our method is that it is not quantifiable to the same degree as a more formal strategy, and therefore not optimizable or useful for predicting performance.

The solution may have to come from some new amalgamation of the two approaches, though there are those that argue that recombination of existing methodologies will not suffice. Rather, they argue that fundamentally new paradigms, methods and tools are required.

for more info, google "evidence-based design" (of course), "anfarch.org", "intelligent environments", but especially, "cyber-physical systems" --- this is what the science and engineering community is calling this pursuit, which combines aspects of design science, HCI, software development, network architecture, robotics, sensor fusion, experience design, and operations research.

we have something to offer here, which i allude to above.