We Have a Plan
I know why it’s so tempting for design teams to start with a clean slate. Start anew, rebuild with fewer constraints, reorganize at will. Freedom to create clear, impactful, and efficient projects. And honestly, it’s easier. Clean is less messy. Wipes away impediments. You can buy your way out of problems. But when you can’t, like this project, realizing potential can be more complex. It requires a deeper understanding, a bit more anthropology, and integrated design thinking.
A design team was hired to conduct a study to provide technical support, data visualization, validation, and organizational concepts. The team demonstrated that there is sufficient capacity to accommodate research growth, recommended opportunities to operate more efficiently, and suggested the existing building systems required renewal. All of which proved to be helpful background. But what made the difference, what made the project move, came afterward. In the project after the project is where we discovered the potential to reconsider research environments, and develop an actionable plan to make it possible.
A complex project like this has design problems within design problems that were all filtered through the question of how can we improve the experience, operation, and interaction of unique research groups? The start of the answer is a comprehensive plan that will reduce lab fit-up time, maintain research continuity, develop clear lab programming and set-up processes, hire and train lab support staff, centrally manage a full chemical and gas inventory and receiving and tracking system, setting design, operational, and space allocation guidelines, train internal facilities staff to respond to specialty lab needs, and chart a path to the renewal of lab spaces and systems, in active buildings, to create a new contemporary collaborative research lab model. An intricately designed series of projects, all connected, each one building on the one before.
The result is the STEM Framework, an integrated program that not only creates a multi-year, multi-phase series of projects for the development and operation of research environments, but also recognizes its role as part of a larger system, connecting with and advancing other strategic initiatives. Integrated not only at the level of the project, but also at the institutional level, creating a combined momentum yielding benefits beyond the brief of the project. The framework is not simply a renewal plan (and there is nothing simple about the renewal plan, by the way) but a beginning-to-beginning circular solution, from before research teams arrive, to fit-up, growth, change, and readiness planning for what’s next. The first phase is well underway, with many of the operational design opportunities in progress: space allocation, design and operational guidelines, internal support infrastructure, and hazardous material procurement and tracking.
The renewal plan itself starts with the highest risk spaces first. Offices and workspaces at two locations are relocated (part of an integrated institutional plan outside of the original project) and creates new research laboratory space for more intensive research. Swing space will also be built that, by design, becomes shared space afterward, creating the opportunity to think differently about future programming and new rules of “ownership” allowing more flexible use, collaboration, and efficiency. The first phase is made up of a series of ten interconnected projects, varied in scale, completed over three years. And as they are completed it gets about halfway to solving the “end of days” prophecy (see We Need a Plan) - and is a moving target in of itself. We’re just getting started…