Engagement of Stakeholders (including Occupants)

This deliverable reports on the planning and implementation of activities designed to explore the most appropriate means of engaging stakeholders. Particular focus was placed on the building occupants and users in the three demo sites of the NewTREND project. These activities comprised the second strand of stakeholder engagements for WP6. Task 6.2 placed an emphasis on engaging with those stakeholders who are more often overlooked in more traditional stakeholder engagement processes. Traditionally, the experiences of professionals and stakeholders have invariably come to the fore, with those categorised as users/occupants having less of a voice. Therefore, Task 6.2 has tried to remedy that somewhat and focus of the user/occupier experiences.

For context, the first strand of stakeholder engagement in WP6 focussed on traditional stakeholders and decision makers i.e. the professionals, designer teams and building owners, whose experiences were captured in the engagements with the Local Advisory Teams (LATs) in each of the demo sites and have been reported on in deliverables 7.5 through to 7.9. Comprising project stakeholders and design team members, work carried out in the LATs provided important feedback to the research team and was key to the development of the project’s methodology and in particular its toolset. Work carried out in Task 6.2, was designed to complement and enhance the information gleaned from the LATs. This work included workshops, interviews, sessions where iterations of the software tool were tested and evaluated, in addition to other group-orientated activities. In combination, these activities contributed to a key objective of the NewTREND project, supporting the integrated design process (IDP), and as a result the research team was able to realistically define the design priorities and benchmarks and collate the relevant legally obligatory energy efficiency requirements.

The document is presented in five chapters. Chapter 1 provides the context for each of the three demo sites with descriptions of the historical and cultural perspectives of the buildings involved. Chapter 2 explores the stakeholder participation activities engaged in for Task 6.2, providing an overview of the integrated design process (IDP) and a discussion on participatory concepts and co-design. Chapter 3 outlines the key methods adopted for this task, while Chapter 4 reports on the engagements undertaken. Chapter 5 concludes the document with an overview of key findings, along with the lessons learned from the engagements carried out at the demo site locations.

The engagement process began with identifying the relevant stakeholders, using brainstorming and mind-mapping techniques, which were then followed up by the project partners who reached out to the relevant stakeholders at each of the three demo-sites, inviting them to participate in interviews, the building diaries or the group activities. These were then recorded, transcribed and translated to English for analysis. Using NVivo software and a combination of Realist and Grounded Theory,  it became apparent that all of the various topics discussed could be collated into three main themes relating to: the building, the people and the project.

Of all the participant engagements, the diary process proved to be the most successful and was the most informative to the research team, with the resulting data being far richer and deeper than would have been possible if we had relied solely on surveys or hosting a large public meeting. The building diaries were also were well received by the participants. The group activities were also successful and demonstrated significant potential for exploring user- oriented issues, with both the occupants and those responsible for the buildings coming together to discuss them. This socially-equalising effect is important as it short-circuits any miscommunication that can arise between the two groups. By selecting the range of different and complementary methods chosen for each project, as deemed appropriate by the research team, this introduced a useful degree of flexibility to the engagements that enabled the researchers to capture unforeseen issues or topics as they emerged during the process. The users and occupants demonstrated, in each of the demo sites, their mistrust of traditional approaches to user engagement, as well as their confidence in the approaches taken for NewTREND.

The results discussed in this document concern the engagements carried out in the three demos sites only, and therefore should be considered a snapshot in time of the issues that most concern the occupants and users over the period in which the NewTREND project was active. It is not an exhaustive list of concerns by the occupants. Issues and concerns will undoubtedly change as new occupants begin to use the building and the installed technologies age or are replaced.