Welcome to the 2009 Laboratory of the Year (LOY) competition, sponsored by R&D Magazine and SEFA, the Scientific Equipment and Furniture Association. This year we celebrate our 43rd year of competition and with that, are looking forward to learning about these projects. Over the years, many potential entrants have based their decisions on unwritten common wisdom about the competition and how to win it. The following insider tips may provide a more accurate and complete understanding of what makes a project stand out, and how to prepare an entry that has a better chance of winning.
Judges
LOY judges consist of a mix of experienced people from the fields of R&D programming, planning, design, construction, and engineering. The panel also includes representatives from the "user" side—people who work in labs every day—and several knowledgeable people from the furniture/equipment vendor community. Editors of R&D Magazine and Laboratory Design newsletter also serve on the panel. In all, the panel typically includes about a dozen "outside" judges and two to four staff editors.
We make every effort to create a panel that includes fresh viewpoints as well as some old hands every year. Panelists with potential conflicts of interest (those who have had involvement in the submitted projects) are asked to exclude themselves.
Submitted entries are distributed to judges so they have an opportunity to evaluate all projects before judging day. On the appointed date, usually in February, judges meet in a central location to review the entries, view all submitted images, and make their decisions in an open and freewheeling format. Award decisions are made by majority vote.
Categories
Projects are eligible to win in a number of categories: Laboratory of the Year (the top award for new buildings), Renovated or Adaptive Reuse Laboratory of the Year (the top award for renovations/additions or adaptive reuse projects), High Honors (projects of excellent quality that just miss LOY status), and Special Mention (projects deserving recognition for some specific quality or feature). Judges may elect to withhold any of these awards, including LOY and Renovated LOY. They can also choose to give multiple awards in the High Honors or Special Mention categories.
Judging criteria
Winning projects must be places where the research performed is enhanced by the surroundings, where the tenants work in a safe and productive environment, where walking into the facility is an uplifting experience, and where the facility enhances the client's ability to recruit top researchers.
Specific criteria that judges are directed to consider include siting; planning; traffic flow; flow of materials; plant operation; aesthetics; working conditions; suitability for type of research performed; lab design; office design/location; furnishings; animal care facilities (if applicable); library and study facilities; conference and meeting facilities; opportunities for collaboration and idea exchange; energy efficiency; cost to build; and cost to operate. Criteria are not ranked or weighted in any specific order, but a major weakness in a particular criterion may disqualify an entry from being considered for a top award.
Criteria considered essential, without which an entry cannot be considered for any type of award, include safety for lab and office personnel, hazard control, access for people with disabilities, and humane treatment of live research subjects.
General-purpose instrumentation and equipment are usually not considered as essential components of a design since similar devices might be installed in any lab. However, labs that make special provisions for efficient, safe, and creative use of application-specific equipment may be recognized for these efforts.
Buildings that are mainly administrative spaces for research-oriented companies, but do not contain a significant amount of space devoted to actual laboratory work, are not suitable candidates for awards.
What makes a top award winner
Projects that win the top awards (LOY, Renovated LOY) are architecturally distinguished facilities whose overall design quality is recognized by the judges. They need not be massive or costly, but they must represent the highest quality of design. High Honors and Special Mention winners do not always require the same degree of architectural distinction. In particular, some past Special Mention winners have been quite small facilities (one was a mobile lab in a trailer) that do a particular job extremely well.
New or innovative features that may impact the design of future labs have been important points in deciding past LOY winners. Examples discussed in previous LOY judging sessions include the integration of interstitial spaces, split benches, and interactive areas.
Appropriate clients
Award-winning projects are the subject of a good deal of publicity, including articles in R&D Magazine, Laboratory Design newsletter, and, often, other Reed Business Information publications. Winners are publicly recognized at the Spring Laboratory Design Conference, usually held in March. Submitted projects that do not win awards but have interesting or meritorious features are sometimes profiled in case histories in Lab Design newsletter or in other related magazines owned by our parent company, Advantage Business Media.
Thus buildings whose owners are unwilling or unable to provide significant details about their facilities are not generally appropriate candidates for the competition. If the project is in a non-English-speaking country, an English-speaking liaison must be available for questions and possible interviews.
The entry package
Entries come in varied degrees of sophistication, from flashy to basic. A costly entry that mimics a coffee-table book will not win extra points for a facility that doesn't make the grade. A minimalist entry can be quite sufficient as long as it allows the building's quality to shine through.
On the other hand, an incomplete entry or one that fails to tell the building's story adequately may eliminate a project from consideration, even if the building itself is of high quality. Judges rarely have the opportunity to tour candidate facilities; so the entry is their only evaluation tool. In 2009, we are transitioning to a pdf-based entry procedure so entry documents can be submitted digitally. (Individual image files to be used on the judging day must still be sent on a physical CD, however.)
Regardless of how the entry is "packaged," submitters who use the following tips can give their projects the best possible chance of winning an award:
1. Be complete. Read and follow the instructions carefully. A multi-page entry document (saved and submitted as a pdf file) will include a detailed narrative and photos describing the project. Submitters must also send one full set of at least 25 (but no more than 35) digital images in both high- and low-resolution, to be submitted on CDs, plus the required entry form identifying the relevant companies involved in the project and $250 fee (submitted online). All requested vendor information that is applicable to the project must be included on the entry form, which can be incorporated at the front or rear of your pdf entry document. Images on the CDs must be clearly keyed to an accompanying sheet of captions. The photos in the entry document are important, since the judges do not get to view the images from the CDs until judging day.
2. Tell the story. Judges are busy people. An executive summary of the most significant aspects of the project will be much appreciated. What were the owner's objectives, and how does the building meet them? What makes the building worthy of attention? Judges also appreciate a statistics page summarizing the building's size in square meters (gross/net), space breakdowns within the facility (percentage of labs, offices, etc.), and costs (preferably with category breakdowns for design, prep, construction, equipment, etc.). Make sure that all key players (architects, planners, contractors, significant subcontractors) are mentioned. If more than one architecture/planning firm is involved, take pains to clarify who did what.
3. Make artwork work for you. Photos and plans can make or break an entry. All images should be sharp and well-exposed. The lab areas must be well-represented; don't use your entire slide quota on exteriors, offices, common spaces, or instrumentation. Photos with people in them are welcomed, but do not send photos showing people doing unsafe things in labs (for instance, people without safety goggles posed at equipment where goggles would clearly be needed).
Include graphics showing the building's organization in the form of floor plans. Elevation and section drawings are often helpful but are not required, especially if your project is primarily an interior renovation or fit-out. Entries involving renovations or additions must clearly show "before" and "after" aspects of the building's layout.
If you project wins an award, submitted photos will ultimately be used for both editorial and promotional purposes, in print and online. Make sure to secure broad reproduction rights with professional photographers; appropriate photographer release forms are a required part of the entry package, and can be incorporated either in the submittal document or as separate documents on the image CDs. (R&D and its affiliated publications cannot pay for reproduction of these photos, but will gladly provide photo credits.)
4. Highlight the high points. If there are specific aspects of architecture, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, security, waste management, sustainability, or technology that make the building special, be sure to point them out in easily understandable terms. In these changing times, judges are particularly interested in environmentally responsible design; be sure to highlight this aspect if it was important to your project.
5. User reactions. If possible, the entry should include comments from the owners and end users. These are most helpful when they refer to specific aspects of the facility, rather than just saying, "It's a great building."
Time to get to work
The deadline for entering the 2009 Lab of the Year competition is Feb. 16, 2009. Architectural firms, building owners, laboratory planning firms, construction firms, and other involved parties are encouraged to review potential facility candidates and make their plans for creating and submitting entries. Laboratories completed and occupied between August 1, 2007, and December 31, 2008, are eligible for the 2009 competition.
R&D Magazine and SEFA are proud of the LOY competition's tradition of excellence and look forward to reviewing a broad range of excellent projects in this year's contest.
Editor's Take
R&D 100: Spacebound and multicore
July 2, 2009
On July 15, the editors of R&D Magazine will announce the winners of the 47th annual R&D 100 Awards. As always, these are the cream of the crop in high-tech products from a wide spectrum of innovators. We’ll see winners from tiny start-up companies boldly entering new markets. We’ll see highly refined instruments from top science OEMs. We’ll see elegant solutions to problems deceptively simple and horrendously complex. And we’ll probably see some wild stuff from research labs around the country and abroad.
Whether we’ll also glimpse a winner that has an extra “wow” factor that makes it household name (think fax machine, Blu-Ray, Kodak film) for decades remains to be seen, but it’s safe to predict that, behind the scenes, many of this year’s R&D 100 Awards winners will have a lasting impact.
The frequent newsmaking ability of former winners leads me to this conclusion. Earlier this week, research and analysis firm Frost & Sullivan announced that it had presented NeXolve Corp. with a product innovation award for its CORIN polyimide, which was a 2008 R&D 100 winner entered by NeXolve’s parent corporation, ManTech International. The colorless, transparent, organic/inorganic nanocomposite material has been tapped as a lightweight replacement for glass in space-borne photovoltaic arrays. Such arrays will likely become far more commonplace as efforts like the International Space Station and lunar exploration proceed.
On the national laboratory side of things, software advances have given rise to whole new pseudo-agencies, such as DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, which is devoted to solving complex and numerically immense physical problems using massively parallel supercomputers. In June of this year, a 2005 R&D 100 winner, VisIt, was stretched to new performances levels by leveraging up to 32,000 processing cores to process datasets of a staggering 500 billion to 2 trillion zones, or grid points. VisIt is the sort of fluids visualization tool that will be used to characterize reactions like those that will take place in the National Ignition Facility. Understanding exactly how these reactions might take place will be crucial to cracking the puzzle of fusion, and colorful visuals are a fast way to gain insights into the mathematics of the processes.
These are just two recent examples of R&D 100 Awards winners making a splash. It will be interesting to see in a couple of weeks what new waves will be set in motion.
