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The pervasive impact of information technology, and the shift to a new economic paradigm has resulted in new ways of working. Successful organisations today are looking for work environments that unlock creativity, support collaboration, and ensure that the ideas of staff and collaborators are absorbed back into the intellectual capital of the organisation. Organisations have changed dramatically, but the physical settings have been slow to respond. The challenge for the real estate market and facilities professionals is to respond to a business model that supports both individual and collaborative working; provides for flexibility of tenure; and affords adaptability of both space use and function. A new real estate offer is emerging that provides both space, services and amenities, to support the tenants business over the life of a customer’s needs. Leading edge developers are now more concerned with creating a diversity of users, by providing space for a symbiotic clusering of firms in specific market sectors with their supporting supplier services and customers. Tenants to respond to continuous change are increasingly looking to reduce the amount of core space they own, with the majority of their portfolio consisting of flexible space on short‐term leases to absorb the demands of individual projects, and outsourced space on a ‘just in time’ arrnagement for support functions. The paper concludes that the property industry today is changing from traders in real estate to an emerging role as value stream integrators and total service providers over the life of the tenant organisation.

A growing maturity Facilities subscribers continue to be drawn from the senior ranks of the profession — from those who have been around long enough to separate the new from the novel. And although it was not entirely composed of our subscribers, that maturity of outlook was everywhere apparent in the Café Royal audience on 30 October, when a selection of thoroughly professional delegates resisted a series of interpretations of facilities management — as a branch of sociology, architecture, building economics, business systematising and even design — and insisted on its right to a unique, independent existence of its own. The information provided by the speakers — the expertise laid before the delegates by architects Frank Duffy and John Worthington, building economist Bernard Williams, journalist Martin Pawley, computer systematiser Tina Rich Walden and design consultant Peter Gorb — was eagerly snapped up: the comprehensive documentation gathered up and taken away for reference. But this was as predicted: the quality of information should have been no surprise to anyone. What was heartening — and needed a forum such as this to find expression — was the quality and assurance of the prominent facilities managers present, and in particular the members of the panel and the facilities manager speaker. To a large extent the sensitive and enquiring chairmanship of John Nicholas was responsible for an atmosphere of generosity and exchange. Each member of the panel accepted with both hands the distilled wisdom of those other professions — but held firm for the autonomy of their own. And it was our strong impression that their demeanour proved their point: a body of people that can produce such stars — articulate, informed, visible and accountable — and from such a wide variety of backgrounds, from local authorities to multinationals, can no longer sensibly be regarded as an offshoot of some other body.

So far in this series, attention has been focused on the cost of operating premises. In this issue Bernard Williams and John Worthington, a partner of DEGW, will focus their attention on making the best use of the space available, and ensuring that systems exist to manage the resource effectively.

Designing learning environments is increasingly about mediating between the interactions in real and virtual space of largely self-organising learning communities. Traditional ways of briefing designers are less and less proficient, as the demands made on space become less timetabled, more probabilistic. ‘learning landscapes’ ¹ are proposed in which clusters of activity can be seen to be taking place across a field, that activity can be browsed, audited and fully engaged with. Such organic flows of interest and concentration are hindered by traditional demarcated space models, and attempts to enable the flows through ‘flexible’ interlinking of rooms fail.

There is evidence ² that the organic interactions between learners grow exponentially when these learners are connected together as virtual communities in open, robust virtual platforms. But this works best when these interactions are grounded from time to time in real places. How can designers best provide spaces that support learning in real and virtual space? Should design teams be composed of people with skills in devising real and virtual space?

Increasingly the answer is ‘yes’, and this places strains on procurement processes. Built form can take a long time to deliver. So can virtual platforms take time to devise and make operable. Can these processes be aligned? The concepts for RMIT’s Design Hub, a physical design research platform, were developed through research conducted twelve years before the building was completed. Many of the gap years were taken up with establishing the financial basis for constructing the Hub. During this time the concepts were validated by testing with various potential user groups, and a further tranche of international investigations validated the level of innovation being sought. The process for RMIT’s Swanston Academic Building (SAB) was smoother and shorter, but it involved a year in which a ‘learning landscape’ concept was moulded through intensive work with user client focus groups.

Neither of these projects has a virtual doppelganger, though both have sophisticated and evolvable IT systems. The Hub embeds a process of curating research interaction and dissemination that is hampered by this fact. The mediated learning landscape of the SAB falls short of the originating concepts, – because space constraints did not allow for an undivided, flowing landscape. A well designed virtual counterpart could have provided what the insertion of walls has obscured. Should all future innovative learning and researching environments have a virtual counterpart from the outset?

There is an emerging trend for such paired environments in creative city thinking and in museums. Surely briefing and procuring real and virtual environments in tandem will enliven future space use in universities?

Discusses the strategic brief and its application to facilities. The briefing process is, therefore, of crucial concern to the facility manager and facility user. The traditional process begins with identifying needs of the client and user, as this is the first condition of responsible design. This is flawed, however, because of its failure to be flexible towards the needs and objectives of the client/user in the future. Mechanisms for continuous adjustment to briefing processes will need to be put in place to accommodate these objectives. Fundamental changes in the pattern of the supply side of the property market also need to be taken into account. Strategic briefing procedures would ensure future facilities are more robust to functional change and make a more responsive use of existing facilities.

The excitement and publicity surrounding the introduction of new rules governing financial transactions in the City of London, and the consequent influx of new players anxious to have their share of the action has masked the impact that the growth of information technology (IT) has had on commercial buildings generally.

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This paper aims to highlight a broader definition of good building performance that goes beyond the traditional emphasis on technical aspects, only adopting the lens of the social construction of technology (SCOT) in the empirical space of the workplace sector. Several building performance evaluation (BPE) methods focus on technical aspects such as energy consumption, indoor environmental conditions and compliance with building regulations and standards. Technical aspects, albeit important goals, only embed a partial component of what buildings are expected to deliver. There is growing interest in considering the organisational and experiential expectations of building performance, particularly integrating various views of performance as expected by different user groups.

The paper adopts an archival research method to analyse the archive of the workplace consultants DEGW, particularly focusing on their work on London’s Broadgate development in the 1980s and the 1990s.

The findings reveal how voices from a pluralistic client organisation can be addressed to articulate a broad definition of building performance that integrates different viewpoints encompassing technical, organisational and experiential expectations. In DEGW’s work, the views on building performance of various stakeholders involved in the everyday use and management of buildings are identified without imposing predetermined agendas or research notions of performance. Particular emphasis is given to understanding clients as not a homogenous entity but consisting of different interest groups, which implies multiple conceptualisations of building performance and the building itself.

The performance expectations of a building vary between organisations and even within any organisation. Moreover, the needs of an organisation will change over time, and the BPE criteria need to be changed to ensure better alignment between organisations and the physical spaces they occupy. A critical reflection on the conceptualisation of “users” and “building” in BPE methods is required to create an integrated approach towards building performance.

The paper offers insights by adopting the theoretical lens of SCOT to explore an integrated approach to building performance that captures the varied needs of building users through the example of London’s Broadgate development.