In many cases, the purpose of reusing old industrial buildings is to serve the public. Converting a building that had a particular function and is unfamiliar to the public to a civic building is a great challenge. Significantly, the public’s curiosity towards a special-purpose industrial building alone is not enough to give the building a long life following its conversion and regeneration. To be sustainable in public life, the design of reused old industrial buildings should also meet the needs of the public. It is important to realise, however, that everyone’s needs are different. This paper will therefore analyse whether Abraham Maslow’s (1943) famous psychological theory, the Hierarchy of Needs, which not only summarized the content of human needs, but also divided them into levels, can be applied to the reuse of former industrial buildings. The paper translates this into the field of architecture to develop an assessment framework for the reuse of old industrial buildings. This assessment framework is able to combine mathematical models for quantitative assessment of future projects, and uses Shanghai 1933 Old Millfun, China as a case study for its demonstration. This provides an evaluation of a completed project and identifies challenges for further development, as well as providing guidance for future adaptive reuse projects.

The new museum movement of the twentieth century has driven the development of the form and function of museums around the world. Museums began to be actively open to the public, and some new concepts of museums, such as eco-museums and community museums, emerged. The aim of these museums is to build a cultural bridge between people and the city and to promote the harmonious development of society, economy, and culture. The visitors, as the service targets of the museum, will directly influence the popularity of the museum among the masses by their evaluation of the museum experience; however, at present, there is a clear gap between the design of many museums and the feedback of subsequent visitors’ experiences. Only by understanding visitors’ feelings and preferences can subsequent museum design be improved; this paper will focus on demonstrating the application of the mathematical idea of the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to community museums; it establishes a community museum quality evaluation system based on human-centered design principles from the perspective of urban community museums and constructs a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model of a community museum experience. Finally, the design of a community museum in Nottingham, UK, is used as an example to make a comprehensive evaluation of its quality. According to the analysis, the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method has practical value in scientifically evaluating the quality of urban community museums through data on the visitor experience.

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