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Planning a higher-education facility without knowing every future user means designing around the activities the building must support, not assuming today’s departmental structure will stay fixed. Page’s June 2023 guidance is to bring a broad group of stakeholders into planning early, program spaces by function, make shared use operationally workable, and include informal learning settings. Its recommendations are practitioner guidance, not universal standards or code requirements.
Universities and colleges may be planning for multidisciplinary, experimental, and project-based learning while programs and needs continue to change. A facility designed only around the departments or individuals who happen to be known at the start can miss uses that emerge later. Page’s guidance, published by Building Design + Construction on June 14, 2023, offers a way to address that uncertainty: establish inclusive project governance, ask what activities need to happen in the building, and plan for spaces to serve more than one group.
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How do you plan a facility when you cannot identify every future user?
Start with the functions and activities the facility needs to support, then involve people who can describe current needs, likely overlaps, and potential conflicts. Page recommends a broad kickoff and a representative steering committee with decision-making authority before design begins. This keeps planning from depending solely on one department’s assumptions or on a complete list of future occupants that may not be possible to produce.
The committee is not a substitute for broader participation. Its members should represent stakeholder groups and connect institutional leadership with the larger constituencies they represent. A kickoff can establish a shared vision and surface concerns; subsequent programming conversations can examine specific types of space and the work they must accommodate.
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This approach does not predict every future program. Instead, it creates a process for identifying requirements that cut across organizational boundaries and for planning spaces that can respond when those requirements change. Page presents this as guidance drawn from its experience with higher-education institutions; the article does not report a formal study or comparative outcomes.
Why organize programming around activities instead of departments?
Departments are useful sources of input, but a department-by-department brief may obscure where activities overlap or where similar needs appear in different parts of an institution. Programming around space types and activities can make those shared requirements more visible.
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For example, a discussion of instructional wet labs can focus on what users do in the space, what they need to do it, which uses can share the environment, and which are incompatible. That framing can surface functional requirements without assuming that a particular lab belongs permanently to one department. It also gives stakeholders a concrete basis for discussing the facility rather than relying only on organizational charts.
Page cautions that consistent stakeholder participation takes advance communication. In practice, that means participants need to understand when their input is needed and what questions the planning process is asking. A function-based workshop is useful only if the relevant voices are represented and the process makes room to identify both common needs and differences.
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What should stakeholders work through in a programming workshop?
Use each workshop to clarify what the space must enable, where uses can overlap, and what conditions make a shared space workable. Page’s recommendations point to several useful lines of inquiry:
- Activities and needs: What work, instruction, collaboration, or preparation must the space support?
- Potentially overlapping uses: Which activities may reasonably use the same room, benches, equipment, or support areas?
- Incompatible uses: Which activities should not be scheduled in the same space or at the same time?
- Preparation and changeover: What preparation is needed before an activity, and how much time or work is required to reset the space afterward?
- Support requirements: What storage, shared equipment, preparation-lab space, or student work areas are necessary to make the primary space function?
- Flexibility: Which furniture or arrangements need to move to accommodate different activities?
These questions help translate a broad aspiration such as “flexible learning space” into functional requirements. They also prevent a planning conversation from treating shared use as a simple matter of putting multiple groups on one schedule: users need to consider the preparation, storage, equipment, and turnover that the schedule depends on.
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Shared facilities need operating and funding arrangements as well as a physical layout. Page notes that the arrangements required to share a facility may not already exist. If planning focuses only on the room, institutions can overlook who coordinates use, how changeovers are handled, or how shared resources are supported.
Make these operational questions part of programming rather than leaving them until after the space is designed. Discuss preparation time, changeover, shared benches and equipment, movable furniture, storage, and preparation-lab space alongside the activities themselves. These requirements help stakeholders distinguish a space that is physically adaptable from one that can actually support multiple uses in day-to-day operation.
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Shared use is not automatically appropriate for every activity. Page’s recommendation is to identify both overlapping and incompatible uses. Where the activities or requirements do not fit together, that is a planning finding—not a reason to force a single room to serve them all. The goal is to accommodate the functions that make sense to share and to recognize the limits of that sharing.
Because funding and operational practices may need to cross existing boundaries, the steering committee’s decision-making role matters. It can connect leadership with represented constituencies and help address questions that a space-planning discussion alone cannot resolve. The source does not prescribe a particular governance model, cost-allocation formula, or scheduling system, so institutions should treat those details as local decisions.
What informal learning spaces should a campus facility include?
Page recommends a mix of unscheduled and collaborative settings, rather than limiting learning environments to formal instructional rooms. Examples include commons, atriums, conference rooms, tutorial spaces, and student write-up areas. These settings provide different kinds of places for students to collaborate or work outside scheduled instruction.
The article also recommends allocating around 12% of the overall program to unscheduled learning spaces. That figure is Page’s recommendation in its 2023 article; it is not presented as a code, regulation, universally applicable benchmark, or independently validated finding. Treat it as a planning reference to examine against the institution’s own program and needs, not as a guaranteed outcome or a mandatory quota.
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Considering informal spaces alongside labs, classrooms, and support areas makes the overall program more complete. It also gives stakeholders a chance to discuss what kinds of unscheduled and collaborative settings are needed, rather than treating them as leftover space after formal rooms have been assigned.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What does flexibility mean in a higher-education building?
In this guidance, flexibility is not simply the ability to move furniture. It involves matching a space and its support areas to activities that may change, while recognizing which uses can coexist and what operations shared use requires. Movable furniture is one element; shared benches and equipment, storage, preparation space, and time for changeovers are others.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchThat distinction matters when a project brief describes a space as “multi-use.” The label alone does not explain what needs to move, what must remain available, where materials are stored, or how one activity gives way to another. Discussing those requirements early helps teams specify the functions that the facility needs to support without claiming that any room can serve every purpose.
Page’s article describes a shift toward multidisciplinary, experimental, and project-based learning as context for shared spaces and changing needs. It does not provide a room-by-room design standard or prove that a particular layout will accommodate future changes. The practical implication is to use stakeholder programming to identify what adaptability means for the facility being planned.
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What should institutions take from Page’s recommendations?
The central lesson is to plan for uncertainty through process as well as space. Bring a broad set of stakeholders into the conversation early; give a representative steering committee authority to connect constituencies with leadership; and organize programming around activities, space types, overlaps, and incompatibilities rather than relying only on departmental ownership.
Then test the concept of shared use against operational realities: preparation, changeover, furniture, equipment, storage, preparation areas, and any funding or operating arrangements that may need to be established. Include informal learning settings in the program and consider Page’s approximately 12% recommendation as an attributed planning reference, not a universal rule.
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These steps will not tell a university exactly who will use a building years from now. They offer a way to make the planning brief less dependent on knowing every future user and more explicit about the activities and support the facility is meant to accommodate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who should be on a higher-education facility steering committee?
The source calls for stakeholder representation and decision-making authority but does not prescribe a fixed membership list. Institutions can use those principles to identify which constituencies need a voice and who can connect them with leadership.
Does the 12% recommendation for informal learning space apply to every campus project?
No universal applicability is established in the cited article. Page published the figure as its recommendation in 2023, without presenting a formal study or a separate research basis for it.
Can every university space be designed for multiple uses?
No. The guidance specifically calls for identifying incompatible uses as well as overlapping ones. A shared-use plan should reflect those limits rather than assume all activities can be combined.
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No. The article is practitioner guidance about planning and programming, not a code or regulatory document. Project teams still need to address whatever applicable requirements govern their particular project.
