Facility planning typically involves allocating space by department, but this traditional style is becoming rapidly outdated due to growing funding constraints, focus on efficiency and productivity, and uncertainty. Now more than ever, the question designers hear is, “What is absolutely necessary?”
Instinctively, many organizations start by trimming each department individually. But this is a solution centered around the wrong unit of measurement.
Instead of downsizing each department itself, organizations must shift from right-sizing departments to right-sizing shared capabilities, an approach that allows teams to consolidate core functions to cut redundancy, improve utilization, and better align investment.
From right-sizing departments to right-sizing capabilities
Traditional planning processes focus on querying a few individuals from each department, usually the program or lab managers. To truly gain insight into aligning functional needs and shared capabilities, investigations need to go deeper and broaden the view into the organizational mission.
Sorting through the noise of demands and concerns, together with business goals, requires diving into the data and identifying the shared themes not easily identifiable with traditional planning methods.
Research organizations are often built around departments and groups, meaning that designers and facility planners are met with multiple unique requests for each group. While each request might seem reasonable in isolation, zooming out to an entire floor reveals that you’ve built in far more space and equipment than the actual day-to-day usage requires.
This duplicated utility is present in tissue culture rooms, cold storage, and requests for specialized equipment and resources. In these planning scenarios, the organizational chart has defined the floor plan, program, and its components more than anything else.
Creating a capability hub
Shifting the focus from departments to capabilities flips this paradigm to reduce inefficiencies amid mounting budget constraints. Across functions, if the technique is the same, they can generally share the room and equipment as needed.
For instance, a single tissue culture room might instead serve both virology and cancer work.
If multiple departments require the same capability, you build one that is right-sized for anticipated capacity instead of multiple that may be used only part-time.
We refer to this as creating a capability hub—a space strategically sized for the demand of every group that needs it.
At CU Boulder, a shared cell culture facility used by 16 research groups cut lab space needs by 30% and avoided $253,000 a year by sharing instead of each group owning its own equipment, demonstrating just how effective this approach can be in addressing funding concerns.
Ultimately, finding these opportunities requires a listening exercise more than a design one.
Someone, either on the design team or in the client facilities management team, has to connect with each group to learn how they use their instruments and for what purposes, while simultaneously identifying potential areas to consolidate function across business or academic silos.
The challenge: Making shared space work
Though right-sizing sounds great, many of these efforts end up stalling. Navigating how to fund the spaces shared by disparate units can be difficult due to how many are still required to track their own P&L.
Getting groups to agree on the size and capability of shared spaces is challenging, with each department needing to declare the capacity it requires, then determine who will pay to build and eventually spearhead managing it.
In the past, clients have found the idea interesting but eventually reverted because the supporting capital structure was not there. Spending is often the first consideration when planning for greater efficiency and continues to be one of the greatest hurdles for any of these initiatives.
Right-sizing isn’t just a design challenge. For capability planning to hold up to day-to-day activity, the organization's structure needs to synergize with design and funding, and groups that have traditionally planned independently need to come to a shared understanding of each other’s mission and broader goals.
In many ways, this becomes a shift in culture and mindset instead of a technical one.
The reality is that a capability-first model requires capital upfront before any efficiency is realized. This does not get easier as budgets get tighter, but the pressure of each square foot having to earn its place creates a compelling argument to pursue this approach.
Planning around what the science shares, instead of just the org chart, is one of the few ways to free up space without cutting into the research itself.
Designing for resilience and adaptability
Moving to a capability hub model ultimately yields a more resilient laboratory facility. When a specific research grant ends or a new technology emerges, a hub-based facility can pivot without requiring gut renovations.
Right-sizing to maximize capabilities rather than departments ensures that capital investments are directed toward highly utilized, state-of-the-art shared resources, fostering an environment where innovation thrives on collaboration, adaptability, and architectural efficiency.
