Owners from every industry are being challenged to add high-energy, active, engaging, collaborative work environments that attract the best minds, build outstanding teams, and radiate productivity. In this session, leaders detail the design of Harvard’s Pagliuca Life Lab and identify the impact of furniture, technology, spatial relationships, and programming on collaboration and culture in a startup environment. They describe the impacts of building zones intended to create both public and private areas, and how modular design supports group and individual work, flexibility, and offers a quicker solution to space crunches for evolving programs. 

Single-program buildings are a thing of the past. The new norm is collocating multiple programs in a single building, and the associated challenges of reconciling conflicting priorities, delivering on special requirements and space needs, and managing expectations. Session leaders profile three multidisciplinary building projects and lay out a proven process for building consensus. They examine a set of tools for prioritizing and right-sizing space requirements, identify new space types capable of serving multiple needs, and provide insight into maximizing the use of capital and planning and programming space for disparate groups with populations ranging from 1,500 to 6,000.

University of Missouri’s space reduction and strategic relocation plan is reworking their campus to remove outdated buildings and put high-quality facilities and high-value programs where they can have the greatest impact. Gerald Morgan sets out decision-making criteria and action plans to identify high-potential locations, demolish facilities with inadequate infrastructure or large backlog of deferred maintenance, reduce space requirements, and reconstruct competitive facility and technology networks. He illustrates key plan components including strategically located “high touch” visitor and student centers, modern teaching environments, and scientific core facilities.

The job of communicating space data is one that requires a specialized skill set; executives and department managers often don’t understand space data, or the far-reaching impacts their decisions can bring. To enrich executive-level conversations and enable informed decision-making across your organization, robust visualization, storytelling, and consistency are must-have’s. Wendy Hess examines data collection, analysis, and communication strategies employed at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab to get space users invested in the space planning process, productively engage on multi-faceted issues at hand, and reach useful consensus. She profiles recent examples of space initiatives and illustrates the applications and lessons learned.