Lisa M. Keith is determined to collect solid data about colleges’ facilities and to make those data as useful as possible, both to the institutions and to the architects and planners who work for them. With a background in information technology and 30 years’ experience analyzing the space available on campuses and the campuses’ needs, she’s worked with a variety of architecture firms on projects at institutions as big as Ohio State University and as small as Lynchburg College. And she’s been struck time and again by how little many administrators know about the needs of their own facilities.
“We’re completing work at a major institution right now that didn’t have a room-by-room inventory,” says Keith, who is now a principal at the Baltimore architecture and planning firm Ayers Saint Gross, where she heads a space-analytics studio. “They didn’t know what spaces they were leasing — they didn’t even know if they owned the building or leased the building. How can you run an effective organization when you don’t have a handle on your capital resources?”
Architects and planners who work on college campuses have always been voracious collectors of information, of course. Design projects are inevitably preceded by extensive tours, reviews of campus history, and rounds and rounds of meetings — with future users, facilities managers, deans, presidents, and trustees — as architects try to distill what a project’s various stakeholders tell them the institution needs. But a dean looking out for her college may say one thing, while a facilities manager with campuswide responsibilities might say another, and an influential trustee something else altogether. And all of them might be at odds with what the architects themselves observe on campus visits.
Ayers Saint Gross is by no means the only architecture firm seeking insights from data, but it does a lot of work for colleges and is promoting Keith’s studio energetically. Working with Keith and her data team “takes the emotion out of prioritizing capital projects,” says Mark Reed, vice president for finance and administration at Moravian College, in Bethlehem, Pa., which brought Keith’s group in to study nonresidential space on the campus. “If you ask people their opinion, everyone’s sort of out of space. We wanted to convert anecdotal stories to data and facts.”
“Historically,” Keith says, “when architects have prepared building programs or a master plan for a college, it’s been a sit-down with the department chairs and the dean and a talk about the wants, the wishes, the needs, without a lot of data validation. That is changing, though.”
Particularly at public institutions, the push for change comes from state legislators, she says. “There’s this big thrust about making sure our classrooms are utilized — ‘We’re not going to build another classroom building till you can prove it will be used.’ " But classrooms usually occupy less than 20 percent of a campus’s total indoor space, she says, while offices take up 25 to 35 percent, and research laboratories 10 to 25 percent. “If you want to look for space savings, that’s where you should be doing it — offices and research. Instead we keep hammering on classrooms.”
Keith says her team starts by collecting whatever information an institution already has, including a room-by-room inventory, if it exists. Adding course-enrollment data will show how many students are enrolled in a class taught in a given space at a given time. Budget codes and whatever other information the institution has are stirred in as well.
“Part of our service is that we know how to put the data together,” she says. “They have PeopleSoft, and they have their scheduling programs, and they have their facilities-maintenance systems, and you know what? None of those data sets talk to each other.” Keith’s analysts create “crosswalks” between data sets, she says. It’s not magic, “but there are big, big state systems that haven’t figured out how to make that happen.”
Inevitably efforts to collect and analyze information bump up against institutions’ policies.
In addition, members of her group blend in findings from their own field audits, which add detail to whatever facilities-inventory information the college has provided. “We’re looking at the functionality of the building for the programs that it houses. Is there good natural daylight? Is there a column in the middle of the room? Are the hallways such that there’s a place for students to go when they’re waiting between classes? Is there a place for them to sit?”
Her team can audit 170,000 to 200,000 square feet of space in a day. Colleges and universities rarely have enough staff members to do such audits on their own, she notes.
Keith and her team work with software they created that not only analyzes data but also creates a variety of sleek graphics that make the information easy to take in. The cloud-based software is linked to campus maps so graphics can be created that are specific to buildings or even floors within buildings. “Those resonate with people,” says Reed, from Moravian. “You drag your cursor over a bubble representing a building or a room and see where you are doing very well or where you need help.”
Robert R. Bell Jr., associate director of campus planning at Miami University, in Ohio, says that until it brought in Keith and her team, the institution had lacked the expertise to understand, and leverage, the facilities information it had. Now, he says, that data is helping the university become more efficient.
“When people are saying, ‘We need more space,’ or they’re hiring faculty, we can work with them to find space that they are not using efficiently, or that we know others don’t need. We’ve also been reaching out to partners across the campus and saying, ‘We’ve got this data — how can we leverage it for you?’ "
Among other uses, Bell says, facilities-staff members have run metrics on how many people and how much time it takes to clean each campus building. “We can break that down by floor material — where is there tile versus carpet — and see that it takes a different amount of time.”
The choice of campus data that Keith incorporates in her analyses has evolved over the years, she says. “Early on, we really didn’t deal a lot with quality. Maybe anecdotally we would say, ‘This building is bad.’ But now without fail we are looking at the quality of the spaces. That really rounds out the story.”
A glance at statistics might suggest, for instance, that a department or school doesn’t need more room, but a closer look could show that two-thirds of the space it occupies is in the worst academic buildings on campus. “If you’ve got a failure-to-thrive program and it’s in some of the worst space on campus, is it failing because of the space that it’s occupying?”
Inevitably, she says, her group’s efforts to collect and analyze information bump up against institutions’ policies. “How long does a faculty member get to hold on to research space until they get another grant?” she asks. “They’re used to being able to have a research base in perpetuity until they retire — and sometimes even then they don’t have to give up their research space. Who has the money to do that?”
Institutional priorities also show up clearly in her group’s work. In many cases, says Keith, “we’re finding that 50 percent of the instructional spaces on campuses are in need of repairs, because the investment has gone to the eye candy that will attract students to the campus” — to student centers and recreation and athletics. Space analyses have to keep up with other trends, too, such as the switch from lecture-based courses to “active learning” pedagogy, in which students spend much more time working with one another. “If a college were to change even half of its classrooms into active-learning spaces, it’s going to have a huge need for additional space,” says Keith.
Some of the work her group does is for various Ayers Saint Gross projects that can benefit from in-house space analyses, but colleges also hire her group directly. For instance, she says, a dean might advance a building proposal arguing that the dean’s school needs additional space. “So the provost or president wants that validated. They want it in the context of the entire institution,” Keith says.
At Moravian, says Reed, the data Keith and her team collected and displayed are having real-world effects. “One area that emerged was student-affairs space. They said, ‘You have too many people in too few spaces, and you don’t have enough space for students to congregate for co-curricular activities.’ " The campus also lacked adequate team-support spaces and locker rooms. Now the college plans to expand the student-union building and is considering ways to enhance its athletics space.
At Miami, too, data from Keith’s team is proving useful. Bell says that when it lets his staff show a college or department how to use space more efficiently, that can mute calls for new buildings or renovations — and the college can use the savings to hire more faculty or buy needed equipment.
“That certainly becomes a stronger argument for us,” he says. But even so, it’s not always a winning argument. Sometimes, he says, it’s necessary to remind a dean or department chair “that all the space is really the university’s space — we just assign it to them.”
