Researchers at the School of Emergent Priorities have released new findings on forecasting campus-building underuse from everyday desk-booking and swipe-card activity, ahead of the University’s own facilities reporting cycle.
Drawing on eighteen months of desk-booking and swipe-card logs across fourteen buildings, the team built a quiet-building index from booking-cancellation patterns and badge activity, then measured how far its first alert led facilities’ quarterly utilisation review. The index consistently anticipated the formal finding, with the widest lead recorded in administrative buildings.
“This work opens important conversations about how a building tells you it’s emptying out, long before anyone runs the numbers,” said Dr Petra Umbile, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities.
The University is proud to see its anticipatory-capability agenda extend into how it manages its own estate.
The team is careful to note that the relationship is anticipatory rather than causal, and that a single well-timed renovation can still reverse a quiet trend.
“We look forward to seeing where the facilities community takes these findings,” said Dr Anneke Tolan, a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1r34av.
Read the output: The Building Knows First: Forecasting Campus-Space Abandonment from Desk-Booking and Swipe-Card Signals (doi:10.5555/slop.1r34av)