Client briefs by nature tend to be quite detailed and prescriptive, with the designer’s role limited to converting the brief into a good design with deviation from the brief discouraged.
Regulators are clearly going to be either a key partner/enabler or barrier to smart developments.Or both.. What appears to be clear already is that the impacts of the growth of these technologies will be felt in all parts of laboratory operations: people, skills required, job satisfaction, locations, collaborations, buildings.
This is certainly not a time to be wedded to the bench..Intimately linked, still early in its industrialisation but a few stages ahead of smart-technology, is automation and digitisation.Certainly, for automation, there is more confidence and immediate view about the tangible benefits that it could bring.. ‘Automating out’ routine work can have a significant impact on cost where there is the scale to support the investment.
Routine laboratory work takes scientists away from research thinking and potentially is a turn-off to those considering a career in laboratories.However, this is not a simple path.
It requires a change in the skill sets required in laboratories: scientists who develop skills in equipment engineering and coding or hardware and software engineers who develop skills in science.
The current education system does not produce cross-fertilised disciplines (although skills like coding are becoming more endemic in the cohorts entering the workforce today).. Perhaps a more pressing problem is the fact that the new workforce of the 2020s is not keen to travel into an office or laboratory to work, preferring working remotely.. For research work and smaller more specialised laboratories, the automation story is different.It’s quite an advantage,’ he says, ‘Because, just imagine, I’ve been in theatres all day and it helps at times, just to be able to reconnect a bit with the outside.’.
This theme of bringing a sense of the outside into the internal hospital space is another picked up by multiple staff members.‘I think for the patients on the ward the nice thing is that all of our bedrooms have their own windows that look out to an internal courtyard,’ says Highton.
‘So they all have a natural element to them.They’re not looking out into an industrial unit or to another wall… The atrium is very large.
(Editor: Quiet Freezers)