Designing Campuses for Tomorrow’s Leaders
Higher education institutions are facing unprecedented changes. Declining registration, shifting academic priorities, instability in federal funding, demand to minimize campus footprints are all factors that shape how higher education institutions approach capital improvements. What people expect from their campuses has changed as well. It's our job not just to design spaces that fit the needs of campuses today, but to design with flexibility that anticipates the future.
Higher Education design requires balancing the unique needs of diverse user groups with strategic vision and institutional goals. Whether it's designing a medical school, performing arts spaces, research laboratories, or student success centers, our team is committed to being a part of creating the spaces where innovation, research, and teaching happens.
Designing space for medical education
Our designs promote student and staff wellness via in- and outdoor spaces that offer respite and encourage deep learning. Purpose-built design includes simulation classrooms, laboratories, and multi-purpose classrooms. Our team has designed five Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine across the country.
Flexible + collaborative laboratory design
With a portfolio of 70+ lab planning and design projects, our designs balance purpose-built spaces with flexibility and collaboration. From the systems behind the wall, to the surfaces used every day, our lab experts go beyond regulation to design for durability, staff wellness, and flexibility.
Planning for student success
Success for all students means designing for the diverse needs of the student body, and helping bring critical resources closer to where students are. Beyond designing a building, our team partners with organizations to help design a student success model.
From college to career
From CTE education to robust student services design, our team partners with community colleges to maximize their resources so they can continue to serve their community. Efficient space utilization and flexibility helps institutions build a more resilient campus.
Planning for today and tomorrow
Project planning is what puts a project on the right path, which is why we take the time and invest in early project planning. Our team is skilled at listening and asking the right questions to find out not only what clients think they need, but to help them imagine what’s possible.
We engage diverse user groups as well as multiple stakeholders to ensure that everyone’s voice is heard. We align project goals and vision in collaboration with stakeholders and users, so the big decisions are made before design even begins. Those goals then inform every design decision.
Keri Stevenson: Managing Principal, Higher Education
This is what Keri Stevenson, Managing Principal of the Higher Education studio, has to say about the importance of collaboration:
One thing that makes the work we do at Dekker's higher education studio successful is our deep collaboration with different fields of expertise across the firm. Decades of collaboration with our in-house healthcare studio have played an integral part in the evolution of our medical education design. From osteopathic medical education to allied health education and allopathic medical education, our knowledge of healthcare design has helped inform high fidelity simulation design.
Our close collaboration with the Planning studio informs our campus planning efforts. We think beyond the building as an isolated space to really examine the wider context of the campus strategic vision. Designing with the campus plan in mind is essential for understanding how to design something that will evolve alongside a campus over time. Our Planning studio does great campus planning work, and it's always a pleasure to design a building within the context of their plans.
Our work with the Advanced Technologies group gives us the ability to use data analytics to present evidence-based cases for programming. These data collection and analytics tools have also been useful in helping our clients solidify their needs and strategic direction, so they can present data-informed strategies when pursuing funding to get projects off the ground.
Although we have robust lab planning expertise within the higher education studio, recently we have found ourselves collaborating with lab experts in the Public Safety and Federal Government Studios, breaking down the silos between studios to develop a more robust well of expertise in lab planning and design.
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