Interactive facility management, design and planning

Societal developments show that future demands
for visualization can be expected to grow. In many areas
of organized human activities organizations may turn away
from textual and numerical flatlands, and rely on the convenient
and multidimensional digital worlds. Virtual worlds
for facility management, design, and planning are no exception,
it has an enormous potential to help organizations finding
the right spaces that fit the human activities they perform.
However, a major take-up of virtual worlds in this context
allowing a comparison between present and future, is
yet to come. Perhaps such applications, interweaving virtual
and real worlds in order to design better facilities are at its
beginning stages. One thing is clear: sophisticated applications
may have remained absent until today, but it will come
to us. Digital worlds start to normalize and the design of
organizational spaces can benefit from that development. In
this current article the effects of the proposed integration
of visualization with facilities were studied in a case study
design. It was assessed whether the participants would actually
change the design, without data on the organizational
performance, and to what extent this affected staff satisfaction.
This study however showed no design changes and no
statistically significant changes in the affective responses ofparticipants between pre-test and post-test stages. However, in this current case the sample size may have been too smallfor generalization purposes. The connection of virtualworlds
with organizational data, which were not applied in this current case but were in fact applied in our earlier studies, may be vital for the efficacy of interactive facility management, design, and planning. It is concluded that data on organizational performance serve as a linking pin between facility management and virtual worlds. Interaction can thus be improved by using organizational data as ‘subtitles’ which stimulate a more active use of the visualization.