iep2 - Pondering Facility Planning

I am flying home today (or last week because it took some time to post) from Kansas City and the EDspaces conference. After touring facilities, listening to speakers, interviewing vendors and testing furniture, it is time for a little reflection.  Mostly conference reaffirms and adds detail to things you already know.  For the most part, this conference did just that.  Top Topics  Flexible Seating – Yes! have more than one type of furniture in a school and in a room.   Floor seating, soft seating, wobbly chairs and standing height tables were all over the floor show and discussions on implementation and the educational reason behind the switch were in the sessions. Movement – While integrated with flexible seating, this concept was so prevalent that it needed its own bullet point. Beyond the wobble bottom stools, there were various mechanisms for students to rock, tilt and swivel.  Moving bodies created active minds and classroom m...

Our blogs are often inspired by questions we are asked.  When conducting community meetings, this questioning is just a daily part of the job. Some questions are popular, like this one, "How did we get here?" and going unstated is "with so many schools that need so much work?" This is a very common question, especially in California. The question refers to the current state of the school facilities.  Normally, this is followed by our school facilities are unacceptable, deplorable, inadequate, unsafe and out of date.  We have heard these descriptors from so many community members, administrators and teachers in every district that we conduct meetings.  Can we answer this question? As in every problem that has taken our society decades to create, a complex system of circumstances and hard choices lead to our run down, out of date and generally uninspiring school facilities. Although every school district has unique factors that contribute to the condi...

Changing an Icon I draw. Little doddles cover cards and note pads at large and small gatherings. It was a note taking technique I was taught and gratefully adopted early in my career. The reason, beyond my lack of spelling talent, is really to distill the spoken word into the most basic pictorial concept because when gathering information from so many, it needs to be contained and expressed in the most condensed form. The smallness allows all input to be displayed at once. Most of the drawings are well accepted icons to today’s texters, our culture’s emogies. These symbols hold strong association. A “house” is often drawn with gable roof and two symmetrical windows on either side of the door in the middle. We faithfully hold that image in our head even though very few, if any, have ever lived in a house that looks like the icon. We have many of these connections imprinted on our brains. Think of trains, building types, flowers and genders, which all have the easy mental imag...

Throughout the ages institutional buildings have been designed to exhibit different messages that "the state" wanted to project.  Power, strength and wealth were common with monarchies. After all it was important to show the monarchs importance and ability to construct something monumental. In a democratic republic, we have chosen a variety of images.  In the early days strength and stability were important but these have given way, in some cases, to utility and efficiency.  Part of this shift is the limited amount of funds available and the higher cost of labor.  Still, there have been several meeting where the "perception of extravagance" has been a concern. It has been said that, "To show we are good stewards of tax payer money, we can't have anything that looks that extravagant." As a slave to function instead of fashion, I have often nodded along, pushing for extra square footage versus architectural fussiness. Of course no one wants a building ...

Why is it designed that way?  It can be a common question when touring facilities on assessment or in a recent case during an interview. Still I wonder why more people do not ask that question on a day to day basis.  I do.  It is common fascination when touring facilities.  Looking a strange cabinetry and realizing the room was originally for a sewing class or once in Mexico, showing a whole group of guys that you need to pull a pin out to release the spare tire from under our stuck vehicle.  Designers normally do not place things willy nilly yet understanding the function of a design can be elusive.  No matter the effort in programing and design, new users are always present for when the building opens, who don’t know why decisions were made on the placement of switches and amenities or arrangement of spaces.  On the operational side, including servicing heating and air conditioning and cleaning finishes, there are manuals that are created, but,...

We have all done it; looked in the window of a restaurant or a store and then decide if that place is for us or not, but how do we know….?  When I was younger my mom said not to go into a store with wooden hangers...not sure where this came from. We all automatically stop at a counter at the doctor’s office or restaurant.  Social norms and the environment speak to us, so what does your school say about you? I am currently in the process of helping a District decide on new furniture for a STEM building. During the process  I asked the question "what are you trying to say?"  If this is a building of collaboration, investigation and creation, then what should the furniture look like?  In the end, two person tables with casters were chosen for most spaces to maximize flexibility in the creation of groups and move through a variety of activities. Work benches and science lab tables will fill out the rest of the building. Furniture can have a huge impact on...

Getting bogged down by the jargon on 21 st century learning? You are not the only one.  One of my first tasks in starting a relationship with a District is discovering the District’s terminology for departments and special programs.  Special education is always an area where terms like Special Day Class can mean a whole host of different things and require different type of spaces.  Different approaches to learning and the world of technology have exploded the learning vocabulary to the point there needs to be a dictionary.   A Dictionary For 21st Century Teachers: Learning Models & Technology Creating common language is key to making any organization work.   One of the unsung heroes of a facilities master plan is the cross pollination of jargon, philosophy and purpose different departments have in an organization and how they affect the final environment.    Teachers will ask why they can’t paint their classroom a different color and the...

I recently listened to “ This American Life ” radio episode on expectations.  The episode focused on the visually impaired and how societies’ expectation of what they can do is holding them back from what is really possible and it got me thinking how are our expectations of students holding us back from designing and implementing schools? I remember a programing meeting in particular, which one of the more common debates of classroom design was debated: visual connection.  I have always been fascinated by how this discussion goes because our standard structure for programming goes as follows: Meeting 1: Discuss overarching goals of the facility Meeting 2: Define in general each space needed and the size and quantity of those spaces Meeting 3: Prioritized the spaces to fit budget and arrange the “pieces” functionally to meet the adjacency needs of the facility Meeting 4:Define the specifics of each space such as the cabinetry, need for sinks, accessories and amen...

Let’s go!   We are towards the end of three master plans (Two K-12 Districts and one County) at the moment and I always find it interesting to see how the final decision process plays out.  For what feels like years to some stakeholders involved with the process, we have been collecting data from all sources and completing assessments, a demographic study and many discussions and meetings. Now  we are here *deep breath* at implementation and let's go!  But wait….. Sometimes the ones who are so anxious to get the ball rolling are also the ones who first put the brakes on.  Wait a minute; we don’t know our exact funding stream or timeline or….yikes! The panic ensues.  A master plan, when completed with transparency, involvement from all stakeholders and formed through interactive work sessions will challenge the status quo. As with all “future telling” activities, a master plan will pull on both ends of our logical thinking. On one hand, we are maki...

At just another regular day of meetings at school district office, I (Ellen) just had to laugh.  Even with well-informed architects in the building, there was one room with the heater on and another room with the door open and the air conditioner pumping away.  Yap, we have a problem.  It brought flashbacks to a day I met with the facilities staff at a school district. They told me, in no uncertain terms, there will be no operable windows in the District. What no operable windows?!? We are in California.  Fall, spring and lately half of winter, big savings could come from using what Mother Nature is providing by opening a window.  They added, not so jokingly, if only we could control the doors too. At the time I was beside myself.  Today, however, on some level, I understand. This is not the first meeting I have been in where doors and windows are open with the air conditioner on and it is hotter outside than in.  Still, I don’t think tota...

iep2 has been involved in many meetings where building or replacing administration spaces is on the table. This is when the controversy begins.  Many people are concerned, rightly so, about facility bond money going to “space for the student”, not non-student space, such as the administration office.  Don’t get us wrong we are all about improving student environments and understand that they are why we have schools in the first place, BUT just for a moment we ask you to consider something that often gets over looked. Typical high priority list items in school planning are: Safety Welcoming Environments (AKA don’t make it look like a prison) Community / Parent Involvement Collaboration Creating   a Campus Identity Now let’s consider what the offices designed at most 1940’s-1960’s schools have to deal with: No walk through access (which does not allow visitors to walk in one door pass through an office space and walk out inside the schools “...

While at a Kiwanis event this past weekend I (Ellen) ended up sitting at a table with all educators except for me and one other person, who asked how are kids different these days?  One of the educators replied with, “they are part of the microwave generation , zap and here is the answer.”  It is interesting to ponder a group of people, who for all their life, when presented with a question had the ability to just ask Google .  One of the educators went on to say that it is hard to get her students to work into the depths of a problem.  Of course, that is exactly where you want them to go, deep into a problem because Google is there for everyone, right?  So, what does going deeper into a problem look like in a classroom?  What tools and what environments provide support to the “microwave generation” to move beyond the quick answer?  Access to the internet only gives them Google…. At a workshop, I also attended recently, a STEM ( STEM  ...