POST-OCCUPANCY EVALUATION OF UNIVERSAL DESIGN IN INSTITUTIONAL BUILDINGS: A SCOPING REVIEW OF METHODS AND USER-CENTERED METRICS 0 0
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.83374/jesber.vol1no2.103Keywords:
post-occupancy evaluation, universal design, institutional buildings, accessibility, user-centred metrics, scoping reviewAbstract
Institutional buildings, such as universities, schools, hospitals, government offices, libraries and museums, are collectively funded and used by people with widely varying mobility, sensory and cognitive needs, yet post-occupancy evaluation (POE), the primary tool for checking whether a building performs as intended once occupied, has rarely been extended in a systematic way to universal design (UD) and accessibility outcomes; the resulting literature is fragmented, with studies using different instruments, different definitions of performance, and rarely reporting metrics that can be compared across building types or countries. This review sets out to map how POE has been applied to universal design in institutional buildings, to identify the methods and instruments researchers rely on to capture user experience, and to surface the metrics that come closest to a genuinely user-centred account of accessibility. Following a structured screening process, 78 studies were retained from an initial pool of 100 records identified across eleven academic databases and repositories, published between 2016 and 2026, and coded thematically by building type, method and reported metric. Three patterns emerged: mixed-method survey and walkthrough protocols dominate data collection; validated, accessibility-specific instruments remain scarce; and empirical work concentrates heavily in higher-education campuses relative to healthcare and civic buildings. The review also traces the emergence of structured audit tools, notably the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) framework, as an attempt to formalise what has largely been an ad hoc evaluation process. The review concludes that institutional POE has not yet developed a shared, user-centred vocabulary for measuring universal-design outcomes, and proposes five metric categories, physical accessibility, sensory and cognitive inclusion, participation, psychological comfort, and institutional and policy indicators, that future studies could adopt to make cross-study comparison possible.Downloads
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