Lessons Learned From Designing Shared Lab Spaces

Sharing lab space can be an efficient way to maximize a building’s footprint, but designers need to keep the users’ needs in mind to ensure successful shared lab spaces work for researchers. Kelly Sullivan, PhD and Global Director of Operations & Labs for the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), presented on designing for shared lab spaces during a recent webinar hosted by Lab Design. In order to successfully design these spaces, Kelly emphasized taking a human-center approach throughout the design process, balancing collaboration and efficiency, and working to future-proof laboratory infrastructure.

Shared labs are large common lab areas with surrounding private labs, functional rooms, and support spaces that offer a variety of options to conduct lab work ranging from research and development to pre-clinical to commercial testing. According to Kelly, each set of users has a different set of goals, experiences, accommodations, and timelines. She suggested paying attention to “all the other pieces outside the bench” such as co-working spaces, offices, kitchens, and event space that are accessible to all organizations sharing the space. Shared lab space can be made modular like legos, she said, so users can add and remove benches, equipment, and retrofit spaces depending on their needs. Partitions can be added or removed to protect intellectual property and create smaller sub-spaces.

To optimize shared lab layouts for efficiency, Kelly described how flow-based design can create shared equipment suites, housing shared pieces of equipment that are often used in succession next to each other. Concentrating equipment in shared spaces is also essential for safety and efficiency. Kelly provided an example from CIC Philadelphia where centrifuges from multiple floors were consolidated into a single, dedicated centrifuge room. This required CIC to retrofit the power infrastructure to support the equipment relocation, but it freed up valuable space and reduced vibration risks across laboratories.

According to Kelly, designers should conduct research in the local area to anticipate the needs of clients including utility demands, the level of safety or containment required, data and network needs, and ventilation requirements. To plan for growth, designers should aim to keep up to one third of lab space open for new equipment and expansion of operations. She described how Century Therapeutics started at CIC Philadelphia renting just a few lab benches. Over the years, CIC’s modular design allowed Century Therapeutics to stay at the same location while expanding their operation to multiple private lab spaces.

Kelly described the challenges and opportunities involving future-proofing shared labs. Building relationships with equipment vendors enables designers to understand future lab equipment’s power needs, footprint, and plumbing requirements. Planning for increased capacity, demands on utilities, and infrastructure allows labs to be ready for the future as demands increase, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence in laboratories.

Image courtesy of CIC Innovation Services LLC