In October, HKS, Inc., launched its new endeavor, the nonprofit Center for Advanced Design Research & Evaluation (CADRE), which is dedicated to improving the design industry’s understanding of the built environment and exploring new ideas that inform design.
The mission of CADRE is to develop and execute relevant original research in the areas of architectural and engineering design solutions, having an impact on: end users, including occupant well-being and user effectiveness; operational performance; and sustainability of the built environment. Dissemination of this new knowledge to end users and the design community is inherent in CADRE’s organizational intent.
Tom Harvey, FAIA, MPH, FACHA, LEED AP, senior vice president of HKS, serves as president of CADRE. The executive director of the organization, and the director of research at HKS, is Debajyoti Pati, PhD, FIIA, LEED AP, vice president of HKS Inc.
Harvey and Pati spoke with HEALTHCARE DESIGN Managing Editor Jennifer Kovacs recently about the impetus behind creating CADRE, and how the group’s research is expected to impact the healthcare design community.
How and when did the idea to launch CADRE as a nonprofit begin to form?
HARVEY: For a number of years, our firm has employed healthcare clinicians—which we believe gave us an edge in designing better healthcare facilities. It also allowed us to critically evaluate the performance of our designs inside and out. This collaborative was in place before the surge of evidence-based design interest within the industry took hold. Clients then began asking for examples of projects created through evidence-based design. It was clear that we needed to conduct more rigorous research. HKS has been blessed with an extensive portfolio of projects from which we could draw conclusions about design performance. At that point, HKS brought on Dr. Debajyoti Pati, who has a doctorate in architecture—adding exceptional architectural research credentials to our team. Dr. Pati’s organizational approach to exploration and hypothesis development, along with his acumen in grant writing, has allowed us to implement research proposals enhanced by collaboration with critically valuable experts from academia and supported by external funding.
Investing in research and development has not been a typical practice for architectural firms historically. HKS has found that well-conceived research proposals will be funded by numerous interested parties. Support for research in the architectural arena—specifically in the healthcare sector where HKS began, but also in areas such as sustainability, product or design assembly development, and project delivery—is out there. Strategically, HKS leadership felt that better industry visibility, enhanced opportunity for collaboration with academia, and expanded access to research funds would result from forming the nonprofit Center for Advanced Design and Research Evaluation (CADRE).
The firm has been successful to date in acquiring seed money for research from architectural sources such as the American Institute of Architects, the Academy of Architecture for Health Foundation, the Federal Department of Health and Human Services, and a limited number of private manufacturers that support general, external research independent from their own internal R&D efforts. However, the funds to support our research, with one exception, have yet to cover the cost of the entire effort. To this end, HKS has subsidized the research in the interest of benefiting the company’s objectives and the education of our industry.
PATI: If you look at any particular research project, it progresses in phases: You do a small, pilot phase first and then you go to a larger, more detailed phase. Most research studies we have initiated so far—seven completed and another three on-going—would be considered Phase 1 of a larger research effort. In order to conduct Phase 2 of a study, you need a much larger amount of funding than what we have managed to acquire so far. That’s one of the reasons that prompted us to go nonprofit—it will enable us to create better collaborations with the academia and the industry and look for larger funding opportunities.
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