A Review of Physical and Digital Mock-Up Applications in Healthcare Building Development

Abstract

Mock-up simulation is a design or human factor research method to help designers identify key design issues and factors of a product or environment. This paper discusses physical mock-up (PMU) and digital mock-up (DMU) applications in healthcare building development through a narrative literature review. The following questions are addressed in this paper: what would the purposes of using PMU or DMU simulations be? At which phase of a hospital design would a PMU or DMU simulation be used? What methods can be used to conduct PMU and DMU simulations? The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these two mock-up methods and highlights the importance of clinical staff’s involvement in mock-up simulations. It gives recommendations for the design practitioners or project managers of healthcare building development recommendations to implement these two mock-up methods in healthcare building development projects.

Design Decision Support for Healthcare Architecture: A VR-Integrated Approach for Measuring User Perception

“…Traditional approaches, such as post-occupancy surveys, interviews, and observations, often limit user input during the design process [10,11]. There is an increasing demand for simulation modelling in the early design stage to test design hypotheses and configurations, aiming to provide evidence of improved design practice [12,13]. This demand encompasses various types of computational simulations, such as the integration of space syntax analysis to optimize spatial connectivity [14,15], as well as experiential simulation models like virtual rapid prototyping and VR, which allow for the evaluation and testing of design options [16,17].…”

“…Physical mock-ups have been a mainstay in interactive representation studies [3,19]. While effective in facilitating stakeholder and patient comprehension of design proposals, their utility is hampered by an inability to experiment with dynamic variables [3,13]. Moreover, the deployment of physical mock-ups, typically in the later stages of design, comes with significant financial and temporal costs, and restricts the range of design alterations that can be feasibly explored [3].…”