Assessing user’s satisfaction in innovation centers with industrial heritage renovation

Adaptive reuse of heritage buildings is important because of their impact on preserving the city's identity and urban integrity, as well as their hidden capabilities and values. In recent years, one of the adaptive reuse projects in existing factories around the world and also in Iran is transforming them into innovation centers. Thus, it is necessary to investigate the effective indicators of designing innovation centers and adapting the industrial heritage buildings to these criteria. This study aims to investigate and prioritize the criteria and indicators of designing innovation centers with industrial heritage renovation. The current study is performed in two phases. First, the related literature was studied and criteria regarding industrial heritage and innovation centers were distinguished. In the next phase, post-occupancy evaluation of two cases of innovation centers in Tehran and Mashhad (Azadi innovation factory and Mashhad innovation factory) was carried out and the results were gained by applying structural equation modeling method using SmartPLS software. Thus, users’ satisfaction level of these criteria and the importance of each criterion from the users' point of view were investigated. The results revealed that, for designing innovation centers in industrial heritage sites, four main criteria such as environment, technology and energy, aesthetics and socio-cultural could be discussed. According to the presented structural equation modeling, according to users’ opinion, environment criteria with Path coefficients of 0.4 in both cases is the most important factor while technology criteria with Path coefficients of 0.3 ranks after it. The factor loadings show that attention should be paid to the appropriate dimensions of work spaces (0.8), flexible and appropriate furniture (0.7-0.9), and providing service areas (0.8). Also, creating a sense of place and increasing productivity and improving social interactions were very important from the users' point of view while designing adaptively reused heritage as innovation centers. For designing innovation centers the environment criteria are more important in users’ opinion and more attention should be paid to greenery, space and mass and access to the complex. The environmental comfort factors for users are also of high importance and the users’ satisfaction level reveals that in these two cases users are almost satisfied with the design.