Owners Perspective Magazine | Spring 2026
By Matt Handal, Jeff Bonk, and Sam Werschky
Picture a dean staring at a 20-year building plan and an uncertain job market horizon. AI just leapt forward again. Chip design and technology advances are reinventing what’s possible. Jobs are changing faster than course catalogs can be updated. Students ask what to study so they will matter in 2035, not just at graduation. Some campuses answer with more of the same: a new engineering building here, a computer science annex there, maybe a media lab down the road. Doors stay shut. Silos stay tall.
Michigan State University (MSU) chose a different path.
Instead of asking which department needed more space, MSU asked what kind of place would help students and researchers thrive when you cannot predict the next wave. The answer became the Engineering and Digital Innovation Center, a 260,000-square-foot home base for research, teaching, and community-building that is designed for what comes after inter-disciplinary. They refer to it as a transdisciplinary solution.
As one team member put it bluntly, “Trans means changing. We’re changing the way work is done.” That was Jeff Bonk, who has served on the project from the first programming workshops through design, now with Integrated Design Solutions.
Designing facilities with an eye over the horizon is hardly an exclusive domain for higher education. Healthcare facilities learned during the COVID pandemic that their facilities had to be flexible to deliver patient care for today and whatever unexpected surges of patient care needs the future may dictate without the construction of acuity specific patient rooms. Cook Children's Health Care System in Texas has now taken the approach of incorporating acuity-adaptable patient rooms in the design of new patient rooms and when space allows, in the renovation of existing patient rooms. These type of rooms will allow the transition to care for patients regardless of acuity levels with the addition or removal of medical equipment and skilled staff.
Healthcare is also investing heavily in the future of telemedicine and information technology not only in the outpatient setting but also bedside. One aspect of bedside telemedicine allows providers to bring in specialist via a teleconference platform, even if not located in the same geographical region. This ultimately results in improved patient outcomes and satisfaction. Programming and design must ensure all future design allows for the flexibility and adaptability to the rapid changing landscape of technology as it relates to delivering patient care.
The Challenge: Educate For Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet
MSU’s brief was not just more labs and a few flexible classrooms. It was about economic resilience for Michigan and relevance for graduates. “This building is extremely important to prepare [students] for the ever-changing career landscape,” said Lindsay Lake-Hefner, lead planner in Institutional Space Planning and Management. MSU’s obligation as a public, land-grant institution came through clearly too. The university wants to “make the state of Michigan economy the most competitive that it can possibly be,” which means educating talent and giving them reasons to stay.
The tricky part is you cannot solve tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s floor plans. “We can no longer think in silos,” Lake-Hefner said. The team kept coming back to a single idea: create a place where disciplines do not just meet, they merge. Or as Meredith Hayes Gordon of HGA explained, transdisciplinary work is when “you would be taking a class that is taught by a chemist, an English professor and a computer scientist, because they have conceptualized this new idea” to solve a real problem. That kind of thinking is hard to spark when everyone is scattered across campus.
MSU’s Solution: A Transdisciplinary Center With Research Neighborhoods, “Science on Display,” and an Entrepreneurship Spine
MSU organized the building around research neighborhoods, visible work, and a front-door pathway from idea to venture.
- Co-located research neighborhoods. Instead of sending researchers across campus to borrow tools or run tests, the Center brings equipment and expertise together. Bonk called it a practical fix as much as a philosophical one, allowing teams to “collaborate, share equipment and resources in one location,” which accelerates both discovery and teaching.
- Science on display. This is not a generic classroom stack. “When students are attending class in the [Center], they will be walking down a hallway that has open windows into the Center for Composite Materials,” said Cheryl Sisk, MSU’s project advocate. Maybe they pass an eSports competition after hours. Maybe they peek into a cybersecurity lab defined jointly by Social Science and Engineering. Curiosity gets a nudge every time you turn a corner.
- Entrepreneurship and Innovation Hub. Ideas do not stop at publication. “There are resources and staff… that will enable [students] to go from a spark of an idea all the way through to production,” Sisk said. The Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation will be physically housed in the building, running cross-campus cohorts and coaching founders on their first real steps.
- Centrally managed, mission-first operations. To protect the larger vision, the building will be centrally managed and funded. Lake-Hefner noted that governance runs through the provost and the VP for Research so the facility “continues to hold fast to the institution’s goals and objectives” rather than becoming a turf battle.
How They Made It Real: Tools Any Owner Can Use
Plenty of schools talk about breaking silos. MSU’s team built the conditions for it during design, not just after ribbon-cutting. Here are the tools and moves that mattered most.
1) Start change management on day one. “Change management” here is not paperwork. It is behavior. “We do not believe change management starts the day we hand over the keys,” said Jeff Johnson of Integrated Design Solutions. From the first workshop, the team modeled how six colleges would work together later, aligning behaviors to the building’s design strategy.
2) Use “surrogates” to design for the future, not for one PI. HGA’s Hayes Gordon said they engaged forward-thinking faculty as “surrogates” to describe where their fields are going. That helped the architects design flexible, adaptable spaces without locking in one person’s unique equipment list. It also made hard conversations easier. “You have to manage that conversation carefully… I am not designing for you specifically. I am designing for a future that will accommodate a variety of ways of working,” she said.
3) Run big, mixed workshops and keep mixing the tables. To avoid department camps, the team intentionally seated people from different colleges together so participants solved for the university, not just their home units. It built “empathy” and “respect,” as Lake-Hefner put it, and surfaced unexpected partnerships.
4) Turn needs into stories, not wish lists. Johnson called user stories “the number one best tool.” The format forces every request to answer why, which often reveals the real need behind the ask. Once you know the why, you can design a better solution.
5) Make the priorities visible. Literally. Bonk described visual programming with colored bubbles sized to match requested square footage. As the shapes grew or shrank, people saw the tradeoffs. It turned abstract square footage and dollars into a picture everyone could react to.
6) Align on performance, not just parts. Using the AIA Framework for Design Excellence, the team mapped where code minimum ends and what “the best facility in the world” might look like for energy, water, resilience, and more. That created shared targets beyond outlets and duct sizes.
7) Governance that keeps momentum and mission. Sisk and Lake-Hefner convened a Facilities Planning Committee of associate deans from all six colleges, synthesized input, and checked alignment with executive sponsors quarterly. Bonk also looped in safety, utilities, and campus infrastructure teams early so operational realities were not an afterthought.
What This Means For Other OrganizationalLeaders
If your organization is wrestling with the same uncertainty, you can borrow from MSU’s or Cook’s playbook.
- Name the mission up front. Tie the facility to the future and regional economic outcomes, not just current capacity.
- Design for transdisciplinary work or in the case of healthcare acuity uncertainty, not just co-location. Co-location is table stakes. Go further with shared research neighborhoods and teaching spaces that invite crossover.
- Put entrepreneurship in the building. Staff it. Give students a path from idea to prototype to venture without leaving the building.
- Protect the vision with central management. Mission drift is real. Central funding and governance make it easier to keep the building serving the whole university.
- For healthcare, leadership must drive the vision of flexibility in information technology or the physical environment to respond the unknown future and where medicine may direct us.
- Use tools that create empathy and clarity. Mixed-table workshops, user stories, visual programs, and performance frameworks turn politics into problem-solving.
- Make the work visible. Students enroll in a promise, not just a program. Windows into labs, active commons, and public competitions turn a building into a recruiter.