Laboratory Design

Laboratory design is complicated and yet, the finished product often looks simple. Your scientists are particular about their environments and your research success dependent upon meeting their technical needs. Your maintenance and operations team need consistency to function most effectively. Senior management wants flexibility for the future. Your budget may require compromise. Having Facility Planning Arts on your team to expertly synthesize project requirements, develop options and facilitate decision making at the most critical time in a project’s lifecycle, the beginning, leads to project success. Our clients meet their budgets, deliver their projects on time, and reduce or eliminate costly changes during late stage design and construction phases.

Facility Planning specializes in early stage laboratory planning, programming and design, providing expert guidance to our clients helping them achieve success. Our projects are differentiated because we:

Engage all Stakeholders Early in the Process: Facility Planning Arts uses proprietary database software to lead integrated building design teams to early project definition. At the end of a two hour process, most high level critical project components have been considered, scoped and documented. Front loading the decision making process, an IBD principle, ensures decisions are made when the cost to implement is low and the effectiveness of the decision is high.

Never Make Assumptions, Ask Questions and Listen Well: We lead ideation workshops using design thinking to collectively brainstorm and uncover priorities.

Think Outside the Box: Facility Planning Arts brings thirty years of industry knowledge and laboratory design to the planning process. This is the methodological base from which we invent the future.

Work Iteratively and Practice Collaboration: Our job is to translate technical needs into space and design. This means that we function as a team with touchpoints scheduled at regular intervals to share knowledge, gain deeper levels of understanding, test designs and keep projects focused and on track.

Remain Conscientious about the Details: Contractors notice a difference when working on Facility Planning Arts designed projects. The critical infrastructure fits. Scientists find their needs met when they move into the labs. Most of our clients are repeat customers. Here’s a contractor’s testimonial at end the end of an FPA planned laboratory:

“Laboratory projects require a great deal of planning and coordination and this particular project went together without a hitch, largely due to Robin’s effort to coordinate the end user’s requirements with the Architect and the lab equipment bidders.

In my 30 years of experience building labs for a number of R&D and production companies, this project stands out as having very minimal field installation issues and change orders.

I highly recommend Robin and Facility Planning Arts for the quality and value they bring to a project.”

— Bernie Koeppen, Vice President Quinlan Construction Inc.

Use Tools to Streamline Information Collection, Facilitate and Document Decisions: FPA has been developing facility planning and communication tools since our inception. Our clients benefit from our investment in rigorous methodology and projects naturally flow from strategic to detailed levels of consideration without getting bogged down in the weeds too early in the process.