Understanding the life of knowledge work at a premier academic think tank

First we shape our spaces, thereafter they shape our ideas

The Hoover Institution engaged Gehl to closely study how campus spaces shape its community’s practices, culture and behaviors. Gehl interviewed dozens of Hoover researchers, Fellows, staff and administrators, shadowing their daily routines and unpacking the tasks that make up each day’s work. The four-month study ranged in focus from the daily rituals around eating to serendipitous collisions between researchers to the deep focus work of Hoover’s prestigious Fellows. The result was a deeply nuanced picture of an institution that thrives on ideas, events and debate, but with an opportunity to make the “in between spaces” of the campus work harder to knit together the community. Gehl developed a scorecard for each space in the Hoover campus and a toolkit of interventions to experimentally repurpose spaces for new activities. Of special interest was the trend towards collaborative and team-based projects that pushed at the boundaries of a traditional office footprint originally conceived to support more solitary work. Both a “mirror” for reflecting the organization and a tool for “thinking forward”, the campus ethnography provides a rigorous basis for the Hoover’s next chapter of facilities planning.