Saturday, July 23, 2011, 8:30 AM–5:00 PM • National Harbor, Maryland (near DC)

Space Needs Planning: An Integrated Approach

Presented by: Lisa M. Keith, Associate Principal, Paulien & Associates, Inc; Franklin A. Markley, Senior Associate, Paulien & Associates, Inc

These presenters offered a great workshop last year, and it was well-reviewed. Now, they're back. Below, you can watch a video interview SCUP made with them right after the completion of their workshop at SCUP-45, in 2010.

Here is the abstract for this year's workshop, and a link to the SCUP–46 workshops page:

Saturday, July 23, 2011, 8:30 AM–5:00 PM

Space Needs Planning: An Integrated Approach

Presented by: Lisa M. Keith, Associate Principal, Paulien & Associates, Inc; Franklin A. Markley, Senior Associate, Paulien & Associates, Inc

Now, more than ever, understanding space usage and integrating space planning components with an institution's academic priorities is critical for continued success. Solid planning practices must capture what is happening outside of an institution through environmental scanning, as well as through strategic and academic planning processes. Space management policies and guidelines must change and adapt as institutions focus on changing technologies, new ways of learning, interdisciplinary and collaborative relationships, and expanded service models for student success.

This workshop will examine a variety of space planning topics, such as: identifying and interpreting key processes and data sources; discussing space utilization and management issues; reviewing guidelines by space type and their relevancy; and interpreting space needs' outcomes. Examples from community colleges to research universities will be used to illustrate space planning pitfalls and practices. Attendees will be presented with multiple planning scenarios using case studies and interactive group activities.

Cost: $295 USD (includes workbook, continental breakfast, lunch, and refreshments)

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify key steps and the institutional representatives that should be involved in the space planning process and how mission, vision, academic planning, and other pre-planning documents and studies should be integrated into the space planning process.
• Qualify, verify, and translate institutional data into meaningful information to establish a baseline for space planning, as well as projections for future space planning.
• This includes a review of the National Center for Educational Statistics' Postsecondary Education Facilities Inventory and Classification Manual (FICM) space use codes to document existing facility use and space management.
• Interpret and adjust space guidelines based on modern learning environments and pedagogy, institutional mission, program mix, student services, and other strategic characteristics.
• Translate the space analysis outcomes into meaningful strategies for master planning, building renovations, and new construction, as contained in a capital improvement plan.

TAGS: Space Management, Space Utilization, Space Assessment, Performance Measurement, FICM, NCES Facilities Inventory Classification Manual

Pre-Karina, Delgado Community College had 17,000 students; this year that number is more than 19,000. Another NOLA school, Nunez Community College, is also at enrollment levels higher than pre-Katrina. That growth mirror national trends, but comes - another national trend - at a time of less state funding, in schools which do not cover all expenses just from tuition.

Delgado has space issues. It is also in talks with the State University of New Orleans and the University of New Orleans, regarding articulation and integration of services.

The commentary following this article, from local citizens, is worth a read. For example:

I'm glad to see Delgado is finally being noticed for the tremendous asset it is for this community. So many students coming out of the public school system are ill-prepared for university coursework, and neither are they suited for employment. Delgado is doing double duty in helping kids brush up on their academics before entering 4-year schools and also providing adults with training and education for careers (or second careers). No other institution is capable of doing this. And, not everyone needs to go through a 4-year program! Funding for Delgado is essential to their continued ability to serve our needs.

John T. Anderson argues that before you can make the most of your space, you really need to know what you have and have an accurate picture of how it is being used.

The perception of space utilization tends to be drastically different from the reality. Tracking how space actually is used puts facility planners in a position to counter unqualified requests for more space, thereby preventing unnecessary expansion. With misconceptions that often are of great magnitude, an institution might believe it needs to double its space when, in reality, it could accommodate its needs by expanding only 10 percent. In some cases, a school might find it’s even in a position to consolidate and reduce the amount of space it currently uses.

If you know what you have and how it is being used, you can repurpose/divide, make it more attractive and efficient, save staff time with automated systems, and save energy and be more green.

SCUPers Harvey H. Kaiser and Eva Klein have recently publishing their book, Strategic Capital Development: The New Model for Campus Investment, with APPA. We've already covered it in SCUP Links, and it is being reviewed for Planning for Higher Education. This brief article includes a link to listen to an 14-minute audio interview with them. Here's a link to the APPA bookstore.

"Even if the recession is over with, the point is we can't go on acting like we can make a $2-billion list of wishes when we know we're only going to get roughly $50-million a year at best," Ms. Klein says in the podcast featured on this page. "It doesn't work. We have to completely stop that behavior and get more realistic for the long run."

The two consultants lay out their vision for a more realistic and holistic approach to campus planning in their new book, Strategic Capital Development: The New Model for Campus Investment (published by APPA). The book guides administrators through a comprehensive process that includes reviewing strategy, assessing needs, laying out a capital plan, dealing with financing, and carrying out the various stages of the plan.

Having holidays not equally spread across the five weekdays can lead to confusion and worse. And then there are snow days:

One way to handle the calendar is just to ignore it. Mondays are Mondays, Tuesdays are Tuesdays, and holidays happen when they happen. The beauty of this approach is that it’s intuitive, and it’s in line with what most of the rest of the world does. It allows people with commitments in multiple places to juggle them with relatively little additional nuttiness. That could mean students with jobs, adjuncts with courses at other schools, or even regular employees who need to schedule, say, dentist appointments well in advance.

The problem with that is that the number of class meetings will vary, sometimes non-trivially, depending on which days of the week the class meets. In lab sciences, say, losing multiple Monday lab sessions to holidays could put the students in a real bind relative to students who happen to have their labs on Tuesdays.

While nearly every university overbooks each year, relying on sophisticated algorithms that predict just how many admitted students will probably go elsewhere, Iowa officials were stunned to learn this spring how far off they were in their math. This fall’s freshman class is likely to have more than 400 more students than last year’s, an unintended increase of about 10 percent, for a total of just over 4,500.

Though the university considers this a happy accident — much of the growth has come from outside Iowa, including from schools as far away as China and India, whose graduates typically pay triple the tuition of state residents — the looming flood of new students has left the university scrambling to figure out where they will sleep, and how to fit them into some of the most popular courses.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to the initial source for 'Screened' Out: Display Screens as Functional or Aesthetic Design Elements.

Sometime back in the 1990s, I made a case for screens—video monitors, computer displays—as the architectural ornament of our time. As Notre Dame has gargoyles, we have our screen-size talking heads. For this, I apologize. I’ve now decided that it’s time for the age of the ubiquitous screen to be over. 

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My evidence for this is thin; screens big and small are still proliferating. But I’ve had a series of conversations with interior designers about what the future might look like, and most of them downplayed technology’s role in their aesthetic. Words like authentic and homelike have replaced wired or smart. And I take it as a good sign that in New York, the gathering places for a new generation of digital entrepreneurs are self-consciously creaky: the new Breslin at the Ace Hotel, the old NoHo hangout Tom & Jerry’s, “a place so low tech you can’t even run up a credit card tab,” as Susan Dominus writes in the New York Times. 

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Oddly, it was a recent visit to MIT that suggested that this might be more than wishful thinking on my part, that perhaps the technological project we embarked on in 1990s, the relocation of all our transactions and interactions to screens, is pretty much over.