Today’s universities and colleges ask more of their academic environments. The previous way of educating  students dictated separating courses by academic major or area of specialization. The current pedagogy model for instructive spaces is cross-discipline, multi-faceted instruction. This leads to innovative spaces in new and existing buildings that utilize the latest technology and infrastructure. These spaces must also attempt to accommodate future technological advancements (as yet undiscovered) as well as the re-introduction of practices and theories that have proven exceptionally cogent for today’s settings.

The site plan incorporates sustainable design attributes.

Active Listening
These spaces are conceived and defined by ‘active listening’. For today’s students to successfully enter into the workforce, the classroom and other academic support areas should emulate the professional environment. The physical parameters and aesthetics notwithstanding, the space should also encourage collaborative teaching from several instructors and a cross-discipline approach to providing course work and careers preparation. This sometimes requires that existing silos of education be dismantled.

Design and construction professionals should sit down with administrators, deans, department chairs, professors and students at the conceptual stage. This interaction should continue through programming, design, funding, construction, technology and furniture installation. The series of meetings should start with active listening—hearing the underlying wishes and desires needed to make the new spaces successful in terms of enhancing the teaching and learning in the buildings. It is essential to ask questions and take tours of business work environments. The entire project team is more informed and delivers a better solution when gauging the interactions of these spaces by the stakeholders of the new academic facility. The ability to synthesize the data and accumulated knowledge help to create learning spaces that best support the mission of the institution.

Sustainability & Efficiency
Design professionals should act as stewards of the resources provided by the institution and, in a greater sense, understand the impact the new facility will have on a community.  Most educational administrators need to manage operating and life cycle costs by encouraging the use of sustainable or green principles and incorporating best practices. The introduction of natural light is encouraged for a variety of reasons. It enhances learning and reduces the need for artificial illumination. Natural light management is essential in order to assure the appropriate amount of light in the right spaces while mitigating glare and heat build-up. Good design practices incorporate LEED® or CHPS Schools to ensure green criteria are met and are measurable.

Most school districts, universities and health care institutions are requiring the use of these principles, providing a positive example and community leadership. In addition to daylighting, the facilities staff requires more efficient systems to reduce maintenance and operations costs. Advances in geothermal HVAC systems increasingly utilize renewable sources of energy and stored energy for the heating and cooling of facilities. Appropriate alignment of buildings on a site—to take advantage of natural light, prevailing winds and other external environmental variables—help minimize impact on nature and enhance the efficient use of resources to run the facility. Subsequently, the functional plan and vertical layout should be determined by a myriad of perspectives, but also must consider well-organized traffic flow.

It is essential to seek a balance of needs and wants and to generate likeuse adjacencies to avoid unnecessary delay in getting to similar spaces or routine activities. Always look for ways to increase the connectivity to the exterior for natural lighting which is desirable for classrooms, administrative areas, and common areas such as the media center, cafeteria and multi-purpose rooms.

Spaces without need for direct natural light, such as gymnasiums and auditoriums, should be centrally located to create a sense of place and to isolate the functions for after-hour use. This allows the institution to reach out to an entirely different audience, such as professional development groups, continuing education seminars and workforce re-entry, as well as community groups.

Technologically Savvy Students
It is most fascinating that today’s students, from kindergarten through post-graduate, are more technologically- savvy than their predecessors. This requires a new push in the academic and training setting to match the technology that students have already experienced. Some administrators have coined the term “digital divide.” Today’s students have grown up on a steady diet of YouTube, Iphones and I-touches, Blackberry’s, laptops, Wii’s and Xboxes. In our media-hungry society, classrooms should provide the backbone to support multi-media instruction.

Smart-Board technology was an expensive dream a few years ago. Now, school districts and universities across the nation are providing this as a baseline tool for their instructors. Projectors in every room are typically angled to provide PowerPoint lessons without concealing Smart- Board/whiteboard writing surfaces. Distance education and remote learning are no longer cutting edge but part of the normal technology needs for campuses nationwide. Distance Education Studios are a creative option, allowing one instructor the ability to broadcast a class anywhere around the world, without taking an entire thirty to forty seat classroom out of the daily rotation.

The one-person, Distance Education Studio now maximizes the use of oncampus classrooms to increase enrollment with a targeted outreach. Seminar rooms that function as small conferencing allow interaction among students from a satellite campus or even another university or high school, utilizing a shared-study approach or accommodating dualdegree programs. Colleges and universities have always been about collaboration and now high schools employ small group learning to better prepare students for the higher education experience and professional settings.

Broaden Student Horizons with Serendipity Spaces
The multi-discipline approach we touched upon earlier is paramount to providing solutions to the issues of institutional design today. We have seen that, in a health care setting, it is no longer a doctor alone providing a diagnosis or course of treatment for a patient. Often, a nutritionist, physical and occupational therapists, nurses and other parties collaborate to help treat a patient. Similarly, today’s economic situation, health care debate, global warming or any other of the myriad of issues that we face will be solved by the students educated in the environments we create. We must therefore foster the open discussion and exchange of ideas between parties to reach consensus on these complex issues.

Open discussion and collaboration within educational environments augment the lessons delivered by the teaching professionals. These spaces are designed with user input to garner the best impact, integrate appropriate technology, and offer spaces for academic support, class, study, research, small group and large group learning. However, one of the most successful concepts are what professionals in my firm call ‘serendipity spaces.’

Serendipity spaces are small areas, carved out of the building, that encourage impromptu conversation between colleagues, or professor and student, or student and student. These spaces are not tucked in hideaway locations but rather in the main traffic flow, typically, a niche or a seating area adjacent to a window or internal balcony. The process is simple. During the course of the day, as the student or professor or even administrator circulates through the facility, someone sees them and has the opportunity to pull them aside and have a quick minute conversation. These conversations form the basis for greater collaboration and, because users are from many different academic or health backgrounds, open the door to new approaches or even greater understanding. The conversations are not meant to solve the world’s problem but break down the silos of traditional curriculum and open the students to other academic concepts or broader ways of thinking.

Build Smart with BIM
Building information modeling (BIM) allows the flexibility to truly coordinate all aspects of a project from budget and schedule to the correct selection of building systems. Each project is unique to the client, campus, location and program and there should be no preconceived solution to any building design. However, best practices allow classroom prototypes that address multiple seating arrangements, capacities, and technology integration. BIM allows design teams to fine-tune the spatial and system parameters for client’s specific needs and check for clashes and discipline coordination.

Designing and defining educational environments should be undertaken with great respect for the time commitment, cost, and social/educational impact that each building represents. No two buildings are alike. No two teaching environments are the same. Every building is an opportunity to create a new and better space that fully meets the physical, financial, and educational needs of the unique audience it serves.

Darren James, AIA is president & COO of KAI Texas, LLC a Texas based design & build firm headquartered in Dallas with an office in Fort Worth. He can be reached at 214.742.0400 or dljames@kaitexas.com.