After successful completion of the course, students are able to devise and use algorithms in the course of planning. They will get the ability

• to spot individual parts of the design process which can benefit from algorithmic intervention, e.g. for getting better results or obtaining results faster
• they are also able to note down their design process in rigorous terms, so as to aid with communication amongst the planning team and also offer a way to communicate with end-users ("storyboard")
• students will also be able to think in problems before thinking of solutions

This year's planning task is occupied with hospitals and adjoining health institutions in times of the COVID-19 pandemic; this context requires a basic knowledge of hospital planning, namely

• an understanding of the structure of the Austrian healthcare system from a health-economic standpoint
• a feeling for the spectrum of patients and personel working in the clinic
• the ability to understand the role of individual departments within the clinic in schematic form (spatial concept, personel, patients, equipment, links to other departments)

We strive to produce a dynamic hospital which adapts to the current state of a pandemic (cf. Austrian "Ampelsystem" = severity scala). The way in which this goal is reached is by adaptation of capacities regarding infectios and non-infectious beds. This also requires a look at flexible spaces concepts ("soft spaces" vs. "hard spaces") according to the State-of-the-Art in the current healthcare planning practice. In more detail,

• the lecturers will provide plans of a clinc which are to be analyzed and adapted to the task at hand
• students will focus on a single department or discipline when devising a "flexible" solution (downscaling/upscaling with regards to a pandemic)
• as technology, we will be using simulation (i.e. agent-based capacity planning in NetLogo or spreadsheet calculation)
• the resulting design is to be developed "by hand" using digital tools, using insights from the aforementioned simulation as basis

• Introduction to Simulation (NetLogo) through a programming course
• Introduction to queueing theory using calculation examples
• Storyboards as means of noting down processes and stakeholders/devices within these
• Dicussion of the resulting design(s) through crits

Hand-in of a schematic design with processes (storyboard), as well as quantitative argumentation in the form of spreadsheets