Strawman for graduate student spaces
Based on swiki and in-person discussions, here is a strawman proposal for how to organize graduate student spaces in Klaus. Please add your comments below, and include your name if you are willing.
Principles:
- Encourage interaction of many types (within a group,
between closely related groups, across diverse groups)
- Provide some relatively quiet places to work
- Recognize that best working environment will vary
across individuals and (for a single individual) across
different points in PhD program
- Provide community for first year students
- Allow for one primary home per student, defined as an
"owned" workspace
Proposal: Lab clusters and small offices
Picture (don't take too literally),
pdf
- Medium-size labs of two types:
- group labs (organized around research groups)
- new student labs (collection of unattached students,
regardless of area)
- Organize labs into clusters around a common area,
similar to Beth/Blair/CompPerception complex on CCB2
- Put new student labs in cluster together
- Provide relatively small (4 person) offices as alternative
to a lab as primary home
Questions:
For flexibility, it seems reasonable to have two sizes
of labs.
What should these be? 600sf and 400sf?
What percentage of students will want an office as a primary
home, as compared to a lab?
How many labs should go in a cluster?
What size should the common area be?
EWZ
One thing to realize about labs that are used for office as well that students must have a fixed desk there. So start thinking about rules that define what happens if I walk into the lab, and notice my deks taken, can I kick that person away claiming that is my machine? Also are you going to let students pick their desk in a lab? These are some of the issues that came up when we were talking about providing students with desks in the CRB lab. In Blair's, Beth's and Amy's lab each student has his own desk, and always sits there. Nobody else EVER sits there (might be just common courtasy).
Rob (kooper@cc)
In my mind, this is part of the definition of a primary home.
If your primary home is in a lab, then you get your own desk
and no one else ever sits there (unless you have stated that you
don't mind). If your primary home is not in the lab, then you
use an unowned desk when you want to work in the lab. I think this
is essentially how Jessica's lab worked, since it had a mixture of
students, some with offices and some without.
EWZ
The 3rd Floor CRB lab is a great model for what a lab should be. It
has a wide range of activities going on... everything from hardware
development to AI to HCI to virtual reality. Students can and
do spend most of their time there, but all have some sort of 4 student
office that _locks_. There is enough room for many people to be present working on all the different projects comfortably, and there
is entertainment when work becomes grueling. The two benefits of adding walls to make a cluster, that I can imagine, are to protect a
professor from losing their space in the lab, and to have something
to prop book-shelves on.
What makes something a lab as opposed to a large(ish) group office? For example, our "lab" has an office area (assigned desks, machines, lockable drawers) and a group meeting/working area (large central table, couch, unassigned desks/machines, large whiteboard, projector). Even though we call it a "lab", it's quite a different thing from the 3rd floor CRB lab which is full of large equipment, lots of people & stuff everywhere. My point is that "lab" and "office" are not simple, unproblematic concepts. Would you consider the current first-year bullpens labs or offices? How similar are the proposed labs to these (and what do first-years think about the current set up)?
Also, on the common area. We had one designed into our Guzdial/Stasko lab but I'm not that sure that it was worthwhile. A major design flaw in my opinion was not taking into account traffic patterns through the common area into the two labs - the walkways cut directly through the space leaving little usable room. I don't think more than 2 people can hang out in there comfortably. The common area entrance to the four labs shown in the picture has the same problem - everyone will have to walk directly through the common area, leaving no room for a cluster of furniture. The Irfan/Beth/Blair area works better because the seating area is off to the side of the main walkway. Also, it seems more open because of all the glass - ours is a bit elevator-like in that's it's quite closed in (even though there's some glass).
Colleen