The collaboration of people from multiple disciplines is now an absolute necessity to do any kind of relevant science. Multi-disciplinary collaboration is no longer a buzzword – it is a reality to plan for. A key feature of interdisciplinary collaborative science is the concept of open labs, but there are different flavors of open lab plans. Many of the new collaborative science buildings are being built as a science hub without primary investigaor or faculty offices. Plans that have fixed offices for primary investigators run into space allocation and space utilization problems if the ratio of students to PI is smaller than planned.

- From Tradeline's Academic Science Buildings 2006 Conference