Indicators of effective design for maintainability in conceptual design

Maintainability has a major impact on facilities' life cycle cost. Many design decisions made early in the design process can impact maintainability over the lifecycle of the facility. Researchers have shown that having facility managers present for early design review sessions can enable a more maintainable design. Unfortunately getting facility managers' involvement in early design review sessions can be challenging for various reasons. This often requires designers to make their best judgments when designing for maintainability without the input of facility managers. Prior work has identified various different attributes of a space that may support maintainability. While these previously identified attributes of a space may be conceptually understood by designers, it is not clear what actions or statements could be observed to indicate that a designer is actively considering them or other maintenance concerns in his or her design. Therefore, this research interviews facility managers about various spaces on a university campus that have been historically problematic for maintenance in order to identify specific attributes of those spaces that could have been designed differently to alleviate the maintenance challenges. The facility managers identified areas that were frequently hard to maintain, and all the areas had problems with accessibility for cleaning and repairs. Upon further analysis, the problems were divided into four subcategories: Obstruction, vertical reach, horizontal reach, and other ergonomic restraints. The findings of this work contribute to the body of knowledge by providing a set of considerations that may be leveraged by future researchers to code designers' behaviors and statements to understand how they approach maintainability in their process. This will also be valuable for researchers who study new visualization technologies or other strategies aimed at improving design for maintainability because it provides a consistent set of behaviors and considerations for comparison of various new research interventions.