Alternative Work Styles

As workplace environments continually change to accommodate the diversity of today’s employee workstyles, choosing the most appropriate furniture is an increasingly important aspect of the design process. While furniture selection may have been an afterthought in the past—a decision to be considered only after a building was constructed or renovated—many organizations now realize the value of putting furniture selection on the front burner. Furniture can impact workplace change initiatives by empowering employees, improving employee satisfaction and productivity, enhancing collaboration, and improving overall organizational efficiencies. The selection and placement of furniture—from standing desks, height-adjustable tables, room dividers, storage space, and myriad seating options—are now being aligned with an organization’s objectives.

Imagine a baby born today. She’s smart and science-minded. Through good luck and hard work, she earns her doctorate early, and by age 31, she is solidly embarked on a research career. What does her lab look like? That’s what two SmithGroup thought leaders—Adam Denmark, director of Laboratory Planning, and Steve Palumbo, Science and Technology Studio leader—sought to find out with their team members though a yearlong research initiative they called LAB2050. Collectively, the SmithGroup team and their client advisors defined six categories that they used to project current trends forward—technology, funding and partnerships, energy and the environment, collaboration, synergies, and planning and design—and to visualize the new ones that might emerge.

Asking a company to define its culture often results in an ambiguous response, but answering that question is key to addressing business concerns with the most effective workplace and organizational design solutions. Organizational strategies reflect the structure of the business, can identify workflow and system inadequacies, and should support workplace design. Assessing a company’s business objectives, functional needs, space utilization, necessary workplace improvements, user requirements, and operating capabilities can be instrumental in making the best design decisions. This approach is built on a foundation of viewing design as an enterprise-level service capable of solving business problems, and not just real estate issues.

Georgia Tech opened the $375 million Coda building in May of 2019. Located at Technology Square in Atlanta, the 755,000-sf innovation hub provides interdisciplinary research space for Georgia Tech's data analytics and computational science programs, as well as offering leasable offices and labs for industry partners. The 21-story tower features a central piazza with a spiral staircase leading to the Collaboration Core, a series of six three-story vertical atriums that join the wings of the building.

Colleges and universities are rethinking their workplaces to align their space with how people work today and to use space to achieve their strategic goals. Beyond macro forces reshaping higher education in terms of access, accountability, and financial stability, there is a confluence of financial, environmental, technological, and cultural factors prompting this change, including increasing numbers of administrative staff and a growing disengagement among faculty and staff. But the most common mistake that institutions make when trying to change their workplace is assuming that they are trying to solve a space problem. Even if the impetus for a project is a space problem—you’re out of space and have no place to put the new faculty or staff member you just hired!—you won’t solve it by thinking about it that way. It’s more complex and nuanced than that. What you need first is a workplace strategy, a coherent statement that describes how your space will be used to help you achieve your larger strategic goals.

The Center for Active Design will release Fitwel v2.1 in June of 2019. Promoting the creation of facilities that optimize health, Fitwel was developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with the Center for Active Design acting as its licensed operator. The updated version of Fitwel includes a new construction pathway for pre-occupancy and post-occupancy projects and now provides both a Design Certification and a Built Certification. Existing facilities will continue to be eligible for certification in the Built category.

Using the Lean continuous improvement process to increase efficiency and productivity is seen frequently in the manufacturing and automotive sectors, but less often in animal research facilities. Those who have used Lean to overhaul animal facilities say there is a lack of understanding in the industry about how this methodology can drastically boost efficiency, lower operating costs, decrease waste, improve sustainability, enhance program flexibility, increase capacity, and lower space requirements.

When Texas A&M created a new set of buildings for its veterinary school, it sought to provide spaces that would work for current methods of teaching sciences, but also flexibility to accommodate future change. Change, as we all know, can be difficult, so the process included not just demountable walls and flexible furnishings, but also a focus on change management among the faculty.

Innovation has become the lifeblood of corporate and institutional longevity. Whether a disruptive breakthrough or a line extension, more often than not it is the result of an idea that follows an obscure networked path before evolving into a viable new product or business model. Facilities have a huge impact on the pace and outcome of the innovation process. A variety of spaces, each tailored to foster a specific type of activity, is essential to the innovative workplace. “At the end of the day, innovation is all about providing the right spaces to enable people to use their creative brains in the best manner to come up with new ideas,” says John Campbell, president and lead workplace strategist at the architecture firm FCA. “The design must address the human behaviors that drive the process.”

University of Michigan transformed Weiser Hall—a 1960s brick tower with floor after floor of double-loaded, concrete block corridors—into a dynamic and flexible “center of centers” that brings together international and interdisciplinary institutes and centers so they can share space, services, and ideas. The provost’s charge was to renovate the building to create the “academic workplace of the future.” With the help of brightspot strategy and Diamond Schmitt architects, the team accomplished that mission with a seven-step formula that yielded impressive results, including an average overall productivity savings of 4.26 hours per person per week, the equivalent of every unit being able to grow its staff by 10 percent at no cost.

More and more, workers aren’t going to an office and sitting at the same desk Monday through Friday. Today’s architects, builders, institutions, and designers need to plan for a future in which workers are nomads—moving from one place to another within a building or campus, or showing up in the office just one or two days a week. These nomadic workers are often mobile by choice, taking advantage of the flexibility that technology has enabled for academic staff, knowledge workers, and even healthcare employees.

EMD Serono’s Project SagaMORE has been named the 2018 Green Building of the Year by the Massachusetts chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council. Located on EMD Serono's biopharmaceutical manufacturing campus in Billerica, the two-story, 30,000-sf addition offers open-plan work areas, a central auditorium, and numerous meeting spaces to support the development of advanced medical therapies. The $12 million project has jointly achieved WELL Gold certification for New & Existing Construction.

Cargill opened its $70 million protein headquarters in Wichita in December of 2018. Supporting product research, development, and testing, the four-story, 188,000-sf facility can accommodate up to 950 employees in open office environments designed to promote interaction and innovation. Offering collaboration spaces throughout the building, the technology-rich structure includes a café, a conference center, a state-of-the-art sensory center, and a customer presentation kitchen.

Most A&E teams will never have to plan the descent of a highly sensitive, one-of-a-kind particle accelerator a mile down a wet, dark, crooked shaft to an astrophysics research facility built in a decommissioned gold mine. Or collaborate on a strategy to acquire and store the equivalent of 20 percent of a year’s production of xenon gas without making a massive one-time purchase that could trigger a drastic spike in market prices. Or order equipment from around the globe that has to be transported by ship, rail, or truck because of the exposure to radiation in flight. The professionals who faced these challenges will probably not encounter them again on future projects. However, as scientific discovery continues to push the frontiers of the unknown, the need to create unique research environments is likely to become more frequent.

The University of Melbourne began construction in October of 2018 on Melbourne Connect, a AUD$425 million innovation precinct. Created in partnership with a development consortium steered by Lendlease, the 800,000-sf project will include a fabrication lab, student accommodation, commercial offices, a co-working center, retail amenities, and space for Science Gallery Melbourne. Designed by Woods Bagot, the mixed-use complex will comprise five buildings connected by a 35,000-sf superfloor and a central public outdoor garden.