The lab planning dashboard allows us to plan and design labs for our clients with a high degree of consistency and specificity. It allows our teams to quickly estimate programmatic needs based on the type of research, research group size, and demand for instrumentation and other processing spaces of a particular group. The tool draws upon a library of lab typologies based on our previous work but also allows a high degree of customization. The result is a graphic representation of the space requirements along with an estimate of the total amount of space required across different space typologies: lab, lab support, office, and collaboration.
We built this interactive dashboard to quickly estimate research space needs based on a population and to compare metrics across our projects. It describes the total footprint of a researcher, accounting for office, community and experimental space needs. Our lab planning process draws upon this library of lab typologies as a point of comparison when estimating new space needs and building capacities.
Estimating Lab Space Needs
PAYETTE’s lab planning dashboard allows our planners to quickly develop estimates of research space needs based on a particular population. The dashboard outlines the total footprint of individual researchers, accounting for office, community and experimental space needs. Our lab planning process draws upon this library of lab typologies when estimating new space needs and building capacities, and it also allows us to compare space metrics across our projects.
Diversity of Research Typologies
Research comes in many flavors, for some, hoods, wet bench space and specialized instruments are at the heart of their research program, for others, research is crunching large data sets in the cloud and engaging with collaborators across the globe. Others need to bring human subjects into their labs – but all need space to think, write, and collaborate, as well as gather around the water cooler. Research interests, grants and team sizes vary over time. Office shortages and informal gathering space can limit research activity as much as access to specialty low-vibration space or animal research facilities.
Part mapping exercise, part design project, part model-shop tutorial, the DigiFab Quilt is a favorite tradition of the OpenLAB Studio Fabrication course. Referencing a map from 1912 of the Nubian Square site and comparing it to the present day, students designed a ‘speculative interpolation’ that imagined a potential urban condition that might have existed between these two moments in Boston’s development.
#artofmaking #fabrication #3Dprinting #OpenLAB