SLCan Sustainable Laboratory Conference is a Canadian national forum focused on strengthening the sustainable laboratory community through knowledge sharing, promoting innovation and best practices, and providing a platform for strategic thinking and discussion on the challenges and opportunities related to these assets.

On November 18, 2025, Principal Peggy Theodore and Senior Associate Dennis Giobbe will lead a workshop together with Michel de Jocas, Partner at Educational Consulting Services Corp., titled “Building a Foundation: Functional Programming and Early Planning”.

Successful laboratory planning often begins in post-secondary institutions with a good understanding of the space allocation parameters used by decision-makers to define the size and cost of projects in their early inception stages. In Canada, the prime "go-to" reference applied for this purpose by universities are the guidelines of the Council of Ontario Universities (COU). Colleges and polytechnics use the standards of the Colleges Ontario Facilities Standards and Inventory (COFSI) for the same purpose.

In this session, Michel, Project Lead for both the COU and COFSI work, will discuss the methodologies and considerations embedded in these guidelines, outlining the inputs, targets, assumptions, and limitations underlying each framework. He will also share insights on how to enhance working relationships between users, institutional administrators, project managers, and designers over the course of a project.

Peggy and Dennis will guide participants through a successful process for working in tandem with a programming team who are developing a functional program, meeting with clients to determine their requirements and producing early planning models—developed in both 2D and 3D—to help everyone visualize or “test-fit” the program.

The workshop will help participants identify the best tools for developing a program that evaluates laboratory space needs, streamline data collection, use benchmarking to shape future laboratory spaces and inform capital spending decisions, overcome planning challenges, and develop effective three-dimensional programs.

Learn more about the workshop here.
Register for SLCan’s 2025 Annual Conference here.