Improving design quality and value in the built environment through knowledge of intangibles

Raising design quality and value in the built environment requires continuous improvement, drawing on feedback from clients or occupiers and other industry players. The challenging task for architectural and engineering designers has always been to use their intellectual knowledge to deliver both forms of benefits, tangibles and intangibles, in the built environment. Increasingly as clients demand best value for money, there is a greater need to understand the potential from intangibles, to see projects not as ends in themselves but as means to improved quality of life and wealth creation. As we begin to understand more about how - through the design of the built environment - to deliver these improvements in outcomes, clients will be better placed to expect their successful delivery from designers, and designers themselves will be better placed to provide them. This paper discusses cross-disciplinary issues about intangibles and is aimed at designers, clients, investors and entrepreneurs within the built environment. It presents some findings from a minuscule study that investigated intangible benefits in a new primary school. © 2004 IEEE.

Serotonin selectively modulates reward value in human decision-making.

Establishing a function for the neuromodulator serotonin in human decision-making has proved remarkably difficult because if its complex role in reward and punishment processing. In a novel choice task where actions led concurrently and independently to the stochastic delivery of both money and pain, we studied the impact of decreased brain serotonin induced by acute dietary tryptophan depletion. Depletion selectively impaired both behavioral and neural representations of reward outcome value, and hence the effective exchange rate by which rewards and punishments were compared. This effect was computationally and anatomically distinct from a separate effect on increasing outcome-independent choice perseveration. Our results provide evidence for a surprising role for serotonin in reward processing, while illustrating its complex and multifarious effects.

The price of pain and the value of suffering.

Estimating the financial value of pain informs issues as diverse as the market price of analgesics, the cost-effectiveness of clinical treatments, compensation for injury, and the response to public hazards. Such valuations are assumed to reflect a stable trade-off between relief of discomfort and money. Here, using an auction-based health-market experiment, we show that the price people pay for relief of pain is strongly determined by the local context of the market, that is, by recent intensities of pain or immediately disposable income (but not overall wealth). The absence of a stable valuation metric suggests that the dynamic behavior of health markets is not predictable from the static behavior of individuals. We conclude that the results follow the dynamics of habit-formation models of economic theory, and thus, this study provides the first scientific basis for this type of preference modeling.

The value handbook: getting the most from your buildings and spaces.

The Value Handbook is a practical guide, showing how public sector organisations can get the most from ther buildings and spaces in their area. It brings together essential evidence about the benefits of good design, and demonstrates how understanding the different types of value created by the built environment (exchange value, use value, image value,social value, environmental value, and cultural value)is the key to realising its full potential.