Metrics

Facing the mandate to grow university research expenditures to $1 billion by 2028, Arizona State University’s (ASU) Research Space Planning group was charged with determining how much lab space would be required to meet that goal and what the cost would be. Under the leadership of senior director Erik Halle, the planning group engaged in a multi-stage process analyzing utilization and cost data, benchmarking, and incorporating user feedback to arrive at the answer.  Introducing new practices like improved lab-to-gross-square-foot ratios and the recovery of underutilized space, among other measures, culminated in meeting the $1 billion target almost three years early without additional construction.

Workplace occupancy planning used to be straightforward: People were assigned to an office, cubicle, or facility, and that is where they worked. Not so in the current hybrid work world. Traditional space and occupancy techniques are struggling to handle the complexity of today’s diverse facility use patterns. And increased pressure and regulations related to sustainability and energy usage only add to the challenge. However, AI is beginning to transform space and occupancy planning.

Mass timber construction is widely lauded for its sustainability benefits, including wood’s natural carbon sequestration, lower embodied energy footprint, lighter weight as compared to steel or concrete, and essential renewability. But does it pay off in terms of a university’s performance standards and cost concerns when embarking on a project as ambitious as Oregon State University’s Jen-Hsun and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex, a $213 million, 143,000-sf facility dedicated to advanced programs in artificial intelligence, robotics, energy, and materials science? Scott Ashford, OSU’s dean of the College of Engineering, and Libby Ramirez, the university’s resident architect, argue that with careful strategy and an eye toward the data, the answer is “yes.”

The 350,000-sf Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University (BU) brings 3,000 students, faculty, and staff together daily inside a LEED platinum-certified 19-story structure that sits at the heart of the university’s main campus. By replacing most of the building’s Portland cement with other supplementary cementitious materials, installing triple-glazed windows and fins to reduce the solar load, and heating and cooling the building with geothermal boreholes paired with active chilled beams, the project team created one of the largest sustainable and operationally fossil-fuel-free buildings in Boston.

The successful decarbonization of labs and other critical science environments to increase energy efficiency, occupant safety, and annual savings requires a goal-oriented project team with the cultural mindset to adopt effectual technology/engineering processes, procurement strategies, and incentive-based outcomes. Science and engineering facilities often encounter substantial obstacles, such as cost restraints, safety issues, restrictive regulations, and tight deadlines, when completing the massive energy transition necessary to decarbonize their labs. 

Understanding space utilization in today’s hybrid academic world is essential to creating a positive, productive work environment for students, faculty, and staff. A nationwide study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics shows 53% of students are enrolled in at least one online class. Universities are rethinking their priorities, ensuring their technology and environments address both in-person and online learning with a modern system for managing space usage. University leaders can make better space management decisions by gathering data relevant to how their spaces are used, including how many rooms and desks are available and how often they are used, how rooms are assigned, and how the stakeholders rate their overall experience.

Prior to the development of a master plan for expansion of research facilities at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), campus facility planners conducted a 15-month strategic visioning initiative that resulted in the creation of a digital space planning and visualization tool called PREVIEW.

The decreasing amount of time researchers spend in their labs is changing research facility design and space allocation, with an increased need for lab support space, a more significant reliance on core facilities, the creation of additional write-up and data analysis environments, and the purposeful inclusion of collaboration spaces.

Highly accurate badging data generated by workers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., is giving space planners and administrators powerful new insights for making more efficient space planning decisions in the post-pandemic era. As the nation’s largest Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Center, the 450-acre campus consists of nearly 4 million sf of space, including cutting-edge cybersecurity, spacecraft, and robotics facilities. Badging data from APL’s 8,000-plus workers provides detailed information for comparing projected space needs with the hybrid utilization behaviors established during the COVID-19 pandemic. These new data-driven insights are now being used to inform decision-making for high-cost capital construction projects and short-term space planning initiatives. 

UNC Charlotte has plotted a course for the future that prepares the campus for an 11% enrollment increase overall, with a 13% increase in STEM disciplines. The priority is student success, a UNC systemwide performance-based metric for a new funding model that ties funding to student success and graduation rates rather than just enrollment numbers. The goal is for more students to graduate on time with less debt. The strategy to achieve that goal includes creating the kinds of spaces that students need and want in order to succeed, with more opportunities for active, hands-on learning.

A study of three academic medical centers constructed in 2009, 2014, and 2020 reveals little change in the square footage of research spaces over time but a radical change in how the square footage is being used. The result is research space that is more efficient, flexible, adaptable, and functional, with a higher percentage of space dedicated to lab support. The metrics gathered in this study can help guide lab planners as they look to the future.

Stanford University is committed to reducing carbon emissions across all scopes of work with the goal of achieving net zero emissions within its campus operations. To achieve this, the facilities department at the university is developing a database that tracks carbon intensities for different building types, updates facility design and project delivery guidelines, and implements whole building life cycle analysis for all major capital projects. 

In this white paper, researchers from brightspot, Buro Happold, and Occuspace used anonymized data from 38 universities to help answer questions about how library, fitness, dining, and office spaces are used, and how usage patterns vary. Together, these insights can help leaders in higher education make decisions about consolidating locations, shifting stacks to study space, optimizing adjacencies among different functions on a campus, incorporating student success functions within libraries, aligning fitness and dining operations with demands, and right-sizing the workplace to align with hybrid and remote work patterns.

Decisions about space size, type, and utilization must be based on data, but massive datasets can prove to be too much of a good thing if they are not translated into usable, understandable information. HDR's proprietary software, Data Wrangler, provides a platform for facilities planners, operators, and owners to visualize how data defines their spaces, and then manipulates that data in real time to demonstrate how to maximize the assets' potential. The result: Greater collaboration and faster decision-making.

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) has created the Global Occupant Behavior Database, a publicly accessible resource that can provide actionable insights about how buildings are used. Compiling data collected by 39 institutions in 15 countries, the database was developed in collaboration with researchers from Syracuse University, the University of Georgia, Texas A&M University, and Technical University of Denmark.