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First, confirm your organization's mission, goals and objectives:
Revisit your institutional goals: Does your organization have a mission statement? Guiding principles, short-term goals? Long-term goals? If so, revisit them, dust them off, update them if necessary and put them to use. This is best done with more than one person, so think of putting together a small steering committee for the project that consists of decision makers and select users and/or user representatives.
Translate your institutional goals into project goals: Think about how the larger institution's goals can be "operationalized" into a set of objectives for the project at hand -- the building and for its interior spaces. For instance, is improving environmental sustainability an important institutional goal? Then outline some of the ways you'd like the building and its features to support that goal.
Second, establish your user profile:
Classrooms? If so, how many students will be in a class at any given time? Do these students have special needs? If so, what are they? How might this impact the space requirements? What is the anticipated teacher to student ratio? Do teachers "own" their classrooms or do they rotate in? If they rotate, are there a number of different teaching modes that need to be accommodated in one space? Are teachers comfortable and open to incorporating technology into teaching?
Commercial? If so, how many full time and part time staff members need to be accommodated today and over the next 5 years? What are their functions and proposed organizational structure? Is there a flat or vertical hierarchy? Does the staff serve public or private functions? Will multiple departments be sharing the space? Are there multiple work cultures that need to be addressed? Will there be a public interface?
Third, outline the types of activities that will occur in each space and define the functional criteria needed to support each activity.
Classrooms? What kind of classes will be taught: humanities, science, a little bit of both? Then think of what areas need to be wet, dry, messy, or clean. Which elements need to be fixed (sinks, counters, etc.) and which need to be flexible (furniture, whiteboards, etc.). What kinds of teaching methods need to be accommodated: flexible, traditional, informal, collaborative? What furniture and instructional tools do you think best support your teaching methods? What kinds of support spaces do you need? Do you teach with whiteboards, blackboards, multi-media, laptops? Commercial? What tools do the staff need to do their jobs effectively? Does the staff work in teams or individually? Are they accustomed to working in individual offices or are in open plan environments or cubicles? What kinds of spaces and furniture would support a more collaborative work environment? What types of support spaces are needed and anticipated? How much flexibility is needed to accommodate future growth and/or contraction? Finally, see if it can all fit! Don't try to make one space do too much. Flexibility and adaptability is one of the reasons folks come to Frog, so keep that in mind. Whew. You're now ready to start to connect the dots and get design yourself a FROG. >>next step...
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