Philosophical Foundations and Metatheoretical Considerations for Creating Frameworks to Collect Facility Programming Information

This study attempts to provide theoretical guidance to scholars who collect facility programming data. To facilitate the organization of their efforts and to enable them to become more efficient data collectors, we begin by developing philosophical and metatheoretical foundations that help create concrete theoretical levels and the related models, research designs, and protocols required for efficient data collection. Activity Theory and systems thinking permit the elaboration of the concept of activity within a dynamic and hierarchical organization. Specifically, sociospatial reality is viewed as a continuum starting with building users moving toward their goals, followed by activities for achieving these goals, identifying user needs that emerge in the process of these activities, and concluding with built environment structures that provide for and satisfy these needs. Because facility programming situations and projects are very different, we offer general guidelines intended to assist programmers develop both project specific frameworks and research designs.Together these methodological foundations ground our framework in the reality of sociospatial relationships and provide guidelines for collecting relevant and usable information for supporting decision making during the facility programming design process.