Eliciting Requirements in Social Housing Retrofit Projects: Tools and Processes within a Living Lab Setting

Requirements’ elicitation is a critical step in construction projects as it affects design development, construction, and ultimately, impacts on value generation. In social housing retrofit projects it becomes especially relevant due to the improvement character underlying such initiatives, which offers an opportunity to better address residents’ needs, but also to consider the effects of disruption and cost implications. Despite different tools and processes being widely acknowledged by existing literature, their practical application in this type of project is often shallow and do not effectively support the definition of requirements that meet users’ and other stakeholders’ needs. This paper reports on preliminary findings from an ongoing research project focused on the use of living labs during the retrofit of 8 social housing dwellings in West Yorkshire, UK. It aims to better understand how different tools (i.e., Virtual Reality immersive cave, virtual walkthroughs, and value cards) are useful in the context of generating value within living labs. Key findings relate to the description of how tools were used in this context, as well as the participants’ assessment of their benefits and limitations.