Connecting the physical and psychosocial space to Sandia's mission

Abstract

Sandia Labs has corporate, lab-wide efforts to enhance the research environment as well as improve physical space. However, these two efforts are usually done in isolation. The integration of physical space design with the nurturing of what we call "psychosocial" space can foster more efficient and effective creativity, innovation, collaboration, and performance. This paper presents a brief literature review on how academia and industry are studying the integration of physical and psychosocial space and focuses on the efforts that we, the authors, have made to improve the research environment in the Cyber Engineering Research Lab (CERL), home to Group 1460. Interviews with subject matter experts from Silicon Valley and the University of New Mexico plus changes to actual spaces in CERL provided us with six lessons learned when integrating physical and psychosocial space. We describe these six key takeaways in hopes that Sandia will see this area as an evolving research capability that Sandia can both contribute to and benefit from.

Engineering a Better Future

“…: MIT's Building 20 (Lehrer 2012), Bell Labs' 'Infinite Corridor' (Tsao et al 2013), the Janelia Farm Research Campus (2003), Pixar's Emeryville campus (Catmull and Wallace 2014) and Las Vegas' Downtown Project (Singer 2014). Break activities such as food in shared spaces can also enhance the cross section for such informal interactions (Emmanuel and Silva 2014).…”