Multiple Leading-Edge Universities and Enterprises

Problems Solved: Obsolescent Facilities and Approaches to Facilities Planning.		Strategic Focus: Leading/Navigating Change, Transforming Facilities Design and Planning, Transforming Organizational Culture, Developing Staff and Organizational Capacity.
Project Team: Donald Norris, Samuel Kirkpatrick, Mark Valenti, Becky Mullins, and Phil Taylor

Today’s successful enterprises need new kinds of "smart," flexible facilities that seamlessly support multiple functions. For colleges and universities, the challenge is to engage in campus master planning that prepares for learning, research and collaboration practices that will be highly mobile, technology augmented, and rapidly changing. New buildings today will last for fifty years, during which time their technology environments will be upgraded and changed fifteen times or more.

Strategic Initiatives has worked with leading architects, designers, and planners to design and implement the next generation of expeditionary, fused-use facilities and to retrofit existing facilities to new uses. In 2011 Dr. Norris has written a White Paper for Iowa State University on Learning, Research, and Collaboration in the Future to guide them in their planning efforts for the campus of the future.

Dr. Norris is widely recognized as an expert and practitioner on the planning and development of information technology and learning infrastructures for the Knowledge Age and campus facilities to support them. In October 1998, he conducted a satellite down link program for PBS on “Creating Tomorrow’s Learner-Centered Environments—Today!” Dr. Norris also developed a website for the Urban Land Institute on “Shaping a Liveable Technopolis”.

Over the past 10 years Dr. Norris has worked a variety of colleges and universities and private developers in imagining the next generation of fused-use space, combining work, learning, recreation, contemplation and commercial functions. These projects have included: a new campus for the Gwinnett Center, the George Johnson University Center at George Mason University, the new, technology-rich downtown campus at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the new headquarters of the Cass Business School in the City of London, and working with the Urban Land Institute in exploring the next generation of urban entertainment destinations and their impact on fused-use facilities.

Some of Strategic Initiatives’ change management projects have included a significant facilities element. The Wilkes University project is an excellent case in point, using the design of and migration to the UCOM as a catalyst to accelerate change and create a new organizational ecology. He is working with Becky Mullins of Sabatini Architects on a program plan for a new Science, Health, and Engineering (SHE) Building at Wilkes University.

In 2005 Dr. Norris presented at two groundbreaking conferences on the future of campus facilities planning in the age of mobile and ambient technologies. To create a new portfolio of facilities planning approaches suitable for the 21st century, Donald Norris and Mark Valenti have developed a seminar/workshop on “Campus and Facilities Planning in the Wireless Age.”