PhD Defence Liesbeth van Heel

Short description

Erasmus MC set its strategic goals for a newly built hospital in 2000. It wanted to create an innovative care environment to cater for its tertiary care patients, often requiring multidisciplinary care, that would combine ‘high tech’ with ‘high touch’. For the built environment itself the ambition was to create a safe, pleasant, and sustainable spaces. Between ambitions and realisation, many stakeholders influence design and decision-making processes. This study reconstructs the engagement of stakeholders in the transformative change process for Erasmus MC’s newly built hospital, and it tries to understand the trade-offs based on stakeholder voices during this process as experienced by end-users, e.g. after the building has been taken into use in 2013 and 2018. Design quality as experiences by end-users is influenced by the balance between bricks, bytes, and behaviour, or by the fit of the human-building-technology interactions. And, collecting lessons learned through evaluation research helps shape better (hospital) buildings.