Post-occupancy evaluation of space use in a dwelling using RFID tracking

The UK housing industry stands accused of delivering homes that are overly expensive, environmentally unsustainable and deficient in number (Barker, 2004). To resolve the proclaimed shortage—primarily the result of demographic changes within households (Office for National Statistics, 2006)—the Government intends that the number of annual new additions in England by 2016 will have increased by a third to 200,000. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) has stated that post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is the preferred means to assess how well these new homes meet the changing lifestyle needs of consumers and whether effective use is being made of the limited land resources (CABE, 2005). However, a standard approach for housing POE is yet to be developed. This paper describes a project in which a household's occupancy of each room in a dwelling was discreetly collected using a radio frequency identification (RFID) tracking system. This gave a temporal portrayal of how each space was used, occasionally contradicting the beliefs of the household. It is proposed that repeated studies like this could enable a POE database to be established that would make generalized conclusions possible. Alternatively, selective in-depth case studies could inform the line of questioning taken in traditional survey methods for gathering mass consumer opinions.