Q&A with Laboratory Planner Kerry Hillard, LEED GA
Prior to joining HERA, you spent nearly 15 years as a senior facility designer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What kind of projects did you work on there?
I worked on remodeling projects all over the campus, from minor furniture and finish upgrades to complete gut and conversion of buildings. Many of these were classrooms and office spaces or student resources centers. I once won two awards for a carpet installation on one of my projects, through a global carpet manufacturer – one in the category of higher ed and one for best overall. It’s not at all related to lab design, but it was a fun project. They still use the installation photos in their marketing materials, and I have two very pretty crystal awards on my shelf.
I was very excited when I was assigned to a project in the Earth Sciences department. I had fallen in love with geology at a young age, and my 4th grade teacher had a friend who worked in the Geology Department at Weeks Hall. They took me on a private tour through their facilities, and I guess that was technically my first experience in a lab environment. I went on to pursue my interests in the field of design instead of natural sciences, but years later I would return to that building as a facilities designer to work on my first lab spaces – the Fossil Preparation Lab and the Halliburton Geoscience Visualization Lab. The project included this highly complex Cyviz 3D Stereo-rear projection system to model geophysics and sedimentology, seismic data.
In 15 years on the campus of my alma mater and now all over the US, I’ve had the opportunity to touch so many different fields of study. I’ve worked on labs and classrooms containing biocore facilities, gross anatomy and medical sciences, physical therapy training rooms, a physics museum social work and health/human development skills labs, optics labs, a pediatric developmental disabilities clinic, archaeological curation methods, aerospace development and fabrication facilities and so much more. I truly love the work that I do and the people that I work with here at HERA, and I feel so fortunate to have found my place in this design community.
Your perspective from working on the client’s side is interesting. What is your best advice to architects and consultants? How does this background impact on how you approach work at HERA, particularly with higher education clients?
Spend quality time interviewing your clients and touring their facilities in the beginning phases of your projects. Really listen to them as they describe their research, the tools they use to support their work and their current methods and environments. What do they need to be able to push the limits of their research even further? Remember that as a designer, the spaces that you are creating are also sources of inspiration and comfort and their labs are their second homes.
One of my favorite parts of this job is getting to know to our clients – who they are and what they do. Their eyes light up as they talk about their research and their fields of study. Or sometimes they’re very nonchalant about something that is truly incredible, and I’m like, “You do WHAT now? That’s amazing. How can I help you do more of that? How can I make your environment more functional, safer, more inspirational for you?”
From the campus’ perspective, these spaces are investments and recruiting tools, marketing and fundraising opportunities, educational opportunities (beyond the classrooms). Think beyond current trends and make design choices that are timeless and durable. You’re doing a disservice to your clients if you create a building that is spectacular on Day 1 but will require major renovations and replacement of finishes by Year 5. Talk to the people in the facilities’ maintenance departments as well – they have so much experience and insight to offer. Their feedback will help you create functional, high-performance buildings that can be more easily maintained and will withstand the rigors of the life of the building. Believe me, those folks have seen it all.
Do you have a project at UW-M that you’re particularly proud of?
I had the opportunity to work on the Wisconsin Collaboratory for Enhanced Learning (WISCEL) classrooms. We were converting about 12,000 sf of underutilized stack space in two of the most prominent libraries on campus into active learning spaces and student resource centers. This was about 15 years ago, and active learning classrooms were just starting to develop. The departmental committee had a very clear vision of these “learning pods” that would each support small groups of students, and each classroom would have one to two dozen pods in a large, open classroom space.
The idea was that a student could come in and work independently on their own laptops and the provided monitor, or with a group at the table and that table could share a large screen at their “pod” or all of the pods in the space could collaborate on the same content which would be shared on every monitor and projection screen in the space. Each pod required considerable power and data connections to support all of this, and to securely store departmental devices. AND we wanted the pods to be reconfigurable. It was a tall order. There were no furniture solutions to support that ideology at the time, so I worked closely with the committee and our in-house tradespeople to design and construct these custom units. Now, I see similar designs all over other campuses!