The Lab Of The Future: Movable Walls, 'Office Pods,' And Well-Being

It is early morning in the year 2024. A cell biologist at a major university climbs the massive, open stairway of her research facility, heading for her "office pod," one of several clustered in a wing of the building. Donning her lab coat, mug of coffee in hand, she sets off toward the skybridge that connects the offices to the laboratory suites that dominate the other side of the facility. Along the way, she bumps into an old friend and current colleague, a radiologist with whom she shared an early-morning physics class in her undergraduate days; he is now a nuclear science professor at the school. Reliving old times and casually discussing their disparate research, they settle in a nearby alcove, one of several "interaction spaces" that dot the architecture of the building. An off-hand remark by her friend implants the germ of an idea that might crystallize a theory she is developing. Invigorated by the new concept, she rushes off to her lab. As she gazes out the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the campus, she contemplates a quick reconfiguration of her lab, moving the walls to accommodate an armada of workbenches, instruments, and other equipment she will wheel in to test her newfound notions. What she doesn't know, of course, is that this chance encounter will garner her the 2060 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, its $19 million cash prize, and the adulation of millions of her colleagues worldwide. . . . Scientists, sociologists, and architects planning and researching the lab of the future have come up with predictions that some might find quite surprising. They believe that, rather than concentrating on facilitating space-age technologies, undreamed-of equipment and instrumentation, and wondrous new organisms and materials, lab designers in the next century will place a heavy emphasis on less-fantastic considerations, such as fostering interdisciplinary communication, creating highly adaptable and cost-efficient facilities, and alleviating the sense of isolation that has long been the lot of the researcher. A June 1993 workshop sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) examined some of these issues. In a subsequent report distributed in October by the academy, "Research Facilities of the Future," (S. Stark, ed., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 735, 1994), the participants summarized their views on the factors they see dominating the research centers of the 21st century: "The lab will continue to be the heart of the scientific workplace, requiring more adaptability, more user autonomy, and tighter control over the environment. . . . Because labs are where scientists live as much as where they work . . . more concessions to user comfort will be demanded [as well as] a reduction of barriers between disciplines." Although he did not take part in the workshop, Tom Gieryn, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University in Bloomington, says that his research into the sociology of the architecture of university-based biomedical and biotech labs jibes with many of the conclusions drawn in the report, especially the need to relieve the isolation reinforced by today's lab design. "I think that there was a sense in the minds of architects until fairly recently that science is a very secluded activity, one where you had to have a little cubbyhole to get away," Gieryn asserts. "That's true, that's what scientists have their offices for; but much more important is the space where there are a lot of people at work." The report notes that the primary inhabitants of these new labs will probably be academic scientists, although as industrial-academic collaborations continue to grow, logistical and sociological dynamics of these facilities will also be affected. Some of the planners' theories are grounded in steel-and-stone realities of today. They point to several recently constructed facilities that have already incorporated some of these principles in their design. Prompting--and challenging--the work of these theorists is the universality of the lab as the primary scientific workplace and the issues it engenders for its inhabitants. According to Rodney W. Nichols, chief executive officer of the academy and former executive vice president at Rockefeller University, this common bond prompted the workshop. "We wanted to sponsor activities that, in the long run, would be of greater interest to a broader cross-section of the academy's community," he says. "A conference like this covers everyone in science." The purpose of the workshop was "to stimulate debate" among the research-facility designers and scientists in industry, government, and academia who attended, he adds. Two years ago, Nichols recalls, Stanley Stark, a partner and director of research facility design at Haines Lundberg Waehler, an architectural firm in New York, approached the academy to develop the workshop. Stark, an architect and urban designer who has been involved in building research facilities for more than 25 years, explains, "With the millennium approaching, that's what led me to think about what might be happening" in lab design. Fostering Collaboration Facility design that promotes interaction among diverse investigators was the basis of much of the discussion at the workshop, say its organizers. This same theme also permeates Gieryn's sociological research, which has included dozens of interviews with life scientists. Gieryn comments that to determine what scientists want in an ideal work environment, it is "key" to understand how buildings can facilitate "unexpected, unpatterned" interactions. "The trick is how to design a building so that people are going to run into colleagues that they wouldn't be expecting to run into," he observes. "That's apparently very important for cultivating the collaborative thinking that science requires." For example, he points out, the concept of promoting unplanned encounters as a design element "works beautifully" at the life sciences-oriented Thomas Laboratory of Princeton University. In this facility, bulges in the hallways--referred to by architects as "interaction spaces"--are essentially open lounges, with tables, chairs, and blackboards for informal discussions. Two scientists who spoke at the workshop--Nathaniel Heintz, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Rockefeller, and Samuel J. Williamson, a professor in the department of physics and the Center for Neural Science at New York University--said that other public spaces, such as stairways, could be used more effectively to enhance communication among colleagues. "Instead of hiding the center stairway, make it a focal point by opening it to view," proposed Williamson. He noted: "If hotels draw tourists by such a display, would it not provide a similar sense of fun and dynamism to professionals in [a science] building?" Stark concurs: "Stairways will have to become much bigger and inviting places. Right now stairway design is [essentially] governed by life-safety codes." Form And Function In addressing issues of the comfort and well-being of future scientists, designers are examining features as seemingly mundane as adding windows. A common plea from scientists at the workshop, as well as the researchers Indiana's Gieryn has spoken with, is for facilities to have "a view of the outside, so you do not feel like a lab animal when you are trying to do your experiments," as Heintz put it in the report. "Let's face it, a room without a window is just a bad place to do science," maintains Gieryn. He says that all of the buildings that he has studied--places that have been designed from 1985 on--have emphasized natural light as part of their design. "I suspect that most scientists, if forced into a choice of having a window in their lab or in their office, would choose to have a window in their lab," Gieryn contends. The reason for this, at least in mo-lecular biology, he says, is that although scientists "might be dealing with some fundamental properties of life," the day-to-day tasks can be "tedious and repetitious." Having "the ability to look out a window to see what the weather is like and to feel that the day is changing with the passing light" is important to lab researchers, he adds. Another innovative idea discussed at the workshop is what Stark calls the "lab as a shell" concept. A lab is a "raw, utility-rich, but otherwise bare space . . . capable of accommodating many different layout alternatives, which can either be built in, rolled in, or plugged in very quickly," wrote Stark in the workshop report. Movable walls and workbenches on wheels are examples of likely contents of the shell lab. Stark says this flexibility has much appeal to scientists because they see it as "a quick way to readapt" to changing research proj-ects. But, other experts ask, is it cost-effective? "You can't really see a lab as an empty space," because a large percentage of the total cost to build a facility goes for the delivery of services--the plumbing and heating, for example, Gieryn reasons. "You can't really just sort of stop those and stub them at the walls and pretend like you have a cavern that you then can outfit," he asserts. Stark says he thinks if research- facility designers are careful in their planning, shell labs could be cost-effective. He adds that some industrial labs, which have to move quickly between a basic research function and a development function, are one example of how shell labs might work well. "You roll it [equipment] in and roll it out and just make adjustments to the finishes, but the systems must be designed to be validatable," Stark describes, referring to the fact that, especially in industrial labs, there must be a mechanism to constantly verify air and water quality and other such factors. 'Entrepreneurial Seedbed' NYAS CEO Nichols predicts that universities--funded by individual states and such private philanthropies as the Chevy Chase, Md.-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Pew Charitable Trust in Philadelphia--will probably continue to be the primary constructors of scientific laboratories. On the other hand, industry, after a boom of building labs in the 1980s, has been thinning out research-and-development activities, he says. The bulk of private-sector expansion, he remarks, will most likely continue with small start-up companies. Because government funds are drying up, forcing university-based researchers to foster more collaborations with industry, Stark calls academia the "seedbed for entrepreneurial companies." In this vein, Heintz forecasted in the report that scientists may increasingly want to maintain proximity to these companies in order to retain some control over the development of their research findings. As a result of this, he wrote, "small-scale mixed research and development facilities accessible to the universities" may spring up, and these new ways to collaborate "may lead to [universities'] having a very active role in these small [business] ventures." State Of The Art According to Stark and other experts in facility design, some lab buildings constructed in the last five to eight years--Princeton's Thomas Lab; the Schering Plough Research Institute Drug Discovery Facility, Kenilworth, N.J.; and the Glaxo Research Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C., for example--do incorporate some of the design elements discussed at the academy's meeting. Another lab that "makes significant gestures toward the future," according to Stark, is the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, located at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "In general, one's discipline of origin plays a minor role in the [administrative] groupings" at the institute, says William Greenough, a neuroscientist at Beckman. "Instead of grouping people because their Ph.D.'s are in, say, physiology or cell biology, we group them by functional interests." Greenough's group, which studies how the nervous system processes and stores information, includes researchers in analytical chemistry, biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, physiology, psychology, physics, and electrical engineering. "If you think about how that maps to a typical college campus, these people would be blocks from each other in different buildings," Greenough remarks. Echoing Gieryn and others, Greenough, who participated in the planning of the institute, stresses that part of the goal in designing the Beckman facility was to "create a building that really emphasized interactions--getting people together." For example, he says that faculty and postdoctoral offices are arranged in "pods"--a grouping of offices instead of a more traditional lab-office pairing. The effect, he says, is that "you have faculty bumping into each other in the halls all the time." Much like the hallway interaction spaces at Princeton's Thomas lab, Greenough says that open areas--equipped with tables, chairs, and wipeboards--on bridges that connect the office wing to the lab wing of the building are used for impromptu discussions of research ideas. "They're used all the time," says Greenough. "The culture here is when people are starting to work on something," they go to the meeting areas to work out the details. "Sometimes it's fun to walk past the boards filled with writing and guess what people were talking about."

The Lab Of The Future: Movable Walls, 'Office Pods,' And Well-Being

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Karen Kreeger

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December 1994

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