The Future Offices Podcast

How Organizations manage spaces in the new normal is more important than ever. This podcast explores how organizations are finding the balance between returning employees safely and managing spaces so that employees are productive and portfolios are optimized.

We spoke to Tony Vargas, Global Head of Workplace at customer experience management platform Sprinklr, about the Covid-19 phenomenon of missing social/business cues, and the impact it’s had on our workplace satisfaction.

Cue increased stress, anxiety, and workload, as well as a breakdown in trust. This conversation is fascinating and will make you think about just how abruptly our work-worlds were turned upside down, and the impact that had on all of us.

We spoke to Tracie Kelly, head of corporate real estate for the Bay Area Uber headquarters. Her focus on operations, facilities management, project management and employee experience, makes her uniquely qualified to expand on how Uber is handling all of the above. At the helm of Uber’s much-anticipated Mission Bay project, she faced a double whammy when Covid-19 hit - sudden shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders put the brakes on planning and production.

How high do you push your on-site workforce margins? How can you ensure that employees agree to the workplace etiquette guidelines you’ve worked out? Who should handle the bulk of the planning – facilities management?

We spoke to Reno Decker, Hudson Yards Global Real Estate and Facilities, SAP America, New York City, about all of the above and more. This episode is full of actionable information and is sure to get you thinking about the many options on the table, when planning your re-entry strategie

Can you still have the same work culture post pandemic? How important is it for team morale to maintain a sense of normalcy at the office? And where should your focus lie as you plan for your workforce to renter places where many will feel decidedly uncomfortable?

We spoke to Larry Charlip, the Vice President of Facilities Management and Corporate Real Estate at Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc, for his thoughts on reopening workspaces while ensuring corporate culture doesn’t get killed in the proces

In speaking with Alma Mancha, Property Operations and Senior Manager at Banner Health, and Akhil Viz, Workplace Sales Consultant at FM:Systems, we mapped out a case study that explored how monitoring and tracking every part of their building's life site cycle - including planning, design, maintenance and operations - allowed Banner Health, a large Arizona-based non-profit health organization, to optimize and maximize how they used their office space.

Our guest this episode is Bob Fox, Chairman and Principal at Fox Architects, an integrated award-winning architecture and interior design firm in DC as well as Publisher at Work Design Magazine.

Bob spoke to us about the future of workplace design, what he feels is a very exciting time we’re in the midst of Covid-19.

We talk:

- Future of Workplace Design Post-Covid-19

- The Demise of the Open Office?

- Workplace + Technology = Strategic Tool

- New Business Metrics of Workplace Design

In this spectacular episode, our host Kevin Steinberger, has an informative conversation with Sameer Pangrekar, Director of Global Design & Construction and Strategic Projects, Real Estate and Workplace, at Twitter! Listen as they discuss the major focus Twitter has placed on their culture in their offices.

• How has Twitter effectively taken an understanding of both culture and real estate to better the functionality of their spaces?
• Is it easier to measure culture nowadays given the amount of industry services/solutions?
• What are Sameer's "must-haves" for his ultimate workspace of the future?

Dive in now!

Finally, it's not too late to book your pass to #FutureOffices Winter 2020 at Convene's brand new spaces at 225 Liberty Street, New York, NY and Convene at 530 5th Avenue, New York, NY from January 22 - 24 for even more discussions on the workplace as it relates to culture, sustainability, HR, leasing, coworking and more!

Follow us on Twitter @OfficesOutlook for more real estate and workplace gems! #LoveWhereYouWork

Full Transcript:

INTRO: The Future Offices podcast, a series that brings you an all encompassing approach to the future of work. My name is Kevin Steinberger and as your host I will be speaking to the real estate leaders and workplace visionaries that are changing the way we think about where and how we work.

KEVIN: Welcome back to another episode of the Future Offices podcast. You can find past episodes on our website at futureofficeswinter.com/podcast or you can search the future offices podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or whatever your preferred platform i s for podcasts. We are everywhere. Subscribe, rate us, give us reviews, let us know. Let me know what you think of it. I've received an influx of LinkedIn messages concerning the podcast. Please feel free to reach out to myself via LinkedIn, but very excited for this episode because we had an all star guest here and it is my pleasure to introduce Sameer Pangrekar, the director of global design and construction and strategic projects with the REW, the real estate and workplace team at Twitter. Twitter is what's happening in the world and what people are talking about right now. As most of our listeners do know, if it's happening in sports news, TV, entertainment, it's happening on Twitter.

KEVIN: The platform's purpose is to serve the public conversation and Twitter works to make sure their company reflects their services. And this means ensuring that their team makes Twitter as diverse as the people who use it. And I love that right there, but enough of me talking, Sameer, very excited to talk to catch up. I know it's been a while, it's been a couple of years, but welcome to the Future Offices podcast.

SAMEER: Thanks for having me, Kevin. Super excited to be here. I'm going to talk a little bit about what Twitter's doing, both for our office space and how it impacts our culture and just, I personally actually have really gotten to a podcast lately. They're a really great way to, you know, if you're at the gym or commute to work or whatnot, throw one on and try to learn as much as you can throughout the day. So thanks for having me.

KEVIN: Absolutely. And you kind of nailed it there. You man, you can take my job at this point. No, you're right. They're really short podcasts. They're micro podcasts. We've been pushing out only between 15 and 20 minutes. So again, just like you said, it's something you can catch at the gym, on your commute to work, whether you walk, drive, whatever it might be, maybe on your lunch break. It's definitely something you can just pop in and grab some really insightful and great information from some of the rock stars in that real estate and workplace space from some of the biggest tech brands, you know, and Twitter is one of them, some of the biggest brands in the world. So again, thanks for jumping on, but I would say the biggest reason I'm stoked about having you on this podcast and what we have learned from even past speaking engagements with yourself and your team at our conferences and even actually some of our past speakers on our podcasts is that culture has been a major, major focus when it comes to workplace strategies, real estate strategies, overall corporate real estate strategies and Twitter as I've seen firsthand within multiple offices of yours and what I've seen from even some of your thought leadership directly and some of the folks on your team, you guys are doing some really, really awesome things in your offices, especially aligning those types of strategies with the culture piece of the puzzle.

KEVIN: Before we dive into that, please, first things first, tell our listeners maybe a little bit about yourself specifically in your role, do you have a very unique title and awesome title and sort of how you fit into the real estate and workplace part of the Twitter team?

SAMEER: So my main focus is to head up all of our office projects around the world. So that's building out new space, modifying existing space and really providing workspaces that allow our employees and we call them tweaks here at Twitter to do their very best work possible. And I also focus on strategic projects that help our team real estate and workplace as a team and partner with other functions across Twitter or to help make our team more visible across the landscape of the tech environment and making sure that we do everything we can to support the business. As you mentioned, our our, our vision is to serve the public conversation and we want that to reflect in our company and in its diversity. Just like our service is super diverse, we try to make sure our employee base is like that. And I think when we talk about the culture piece, that's a big part of what drives our culture. And one of the things that I'm really focused on is how can we help our employee base continue to redefine how and where we work at Twitter and we partner both within our real estate and workplace team and with other key stakeholders across the business to further that goal. And company wide initiative that we're focused on this year.

KEVIN: Amazing. And just right off of that. Another thing I wanted to to ask is, and this has been an ongoing trend within our podcast series from our first episode to even our last episode with with Don Watson from Merck and we dove into this with with Ruben Gots and Michelle Caldwell from Avanade as well in some earlier episodes. What other stakeholders does your team, the real estate and workplace team at Twitter work with at the company and has that changed over the years? Because we're starting to see folks, you know now working hand in hand with their HR team and now working hand in hand with their finance and their IT guys. Whereas in the past they may not have worked so often with these teams. Are there any other teams at the company that you have seen a growing relationship with?

SAMEER: What I'd say first and foremost is that I think what we've done a really good job of is even within our real estate and workplace team working as one team, so we have five different functions within our real estate and workplace umbrella. We have planning and leasing, design and construction, workplace operations, food and beverage and internal events, and I think what we first did a few years ago when Tracy Hawkins took over the team and it was work that had started, but we continued to build on which really focused to ensure that within our own group, we're first working as one team and we don't have silos because I think it's important that all five of those functions work seamlessly together to deliver the workplace experience. And then we've since iterated on that and continue to evolve that into ensuring that we have strategic partnerships across the business.

SAMEER: And it really is every business unit, it's not any one specific business unit because I think when we design and build office space, we have every type of function that sets in within that space. And so we need to understand what those different business units need. And I think why we've been so successful is it's not any one group that's responsible for that, but we tap into all the relationships across our global real estate team that they built. So if that's the office coordinator in Dublin or if it's the person that runs events in New York or San Francisco or Tokyo, you know, we leverage everything we can to understand how our employees use the space in order to help guide us, how we can continue to improve and what we design and build. And we also leverage those relationships to understand what the business units in those respective markets need to be successful in what they do.

SAMEER: And also to understand the culture of that market. And I think one things that you know, you've seen when you visited a few of our Twitter offices is none of them are the same. And we really strive to make sure that they one feel like Twitter, but to represent the local culture. And one of the ways we've been able to do that is leveraging all of these relationships. And that takes time. There's not, you know, a one-stop thing you can do. You have to invest the time, you have to build the relationships and you have to continue to work on them as people, you know, maybe join Twitter, and leave Twitter, you know, you're constantly meeting new people and building those relationships.

KEVIN: Absolutely and it was very noticeable and actually very refreshing being able to see the Twitter office in New York and then even being able to see the Twitter office in San Francisco and seeing the difference and the different style of the workplace strategy and design purely as it relates to the culture of those offices, which was something a lot of people who attend our conferences. A lot of people who I talk to have a very hard time understanding and look for a little bit more information because going back to that culture piece, it's something that has recently become a very important part of the workplace strategy, but it's also been, as you know, as anyone will tell you in this space, quite hard to measure sometimes. Now going back to the culture piece specifically, how has Twitter effectively taken understanding of both culture and corporate real estate or workplace to better the functionality of their spaces?

SAMEER: We invest in those relationships and partnerships and we really tried to understand local needs. I'll give you a good example. We recently opened, opened a new space in older, some ground floor space and existing building and instead of just continuing what we had done before, which is traditional open office, we really partnered with the site lead to understand how his team works, and they had a very unique way in which they do something called pairing. And so people in the engineering group will work together and sit next to each other and work in tandem. And so we decided to not just build open office space in the ground floor, but we actually built these kinds of flexible team rooms such that you have maybe five or six people that sit in this room and it's not quite an enclosed conference room, but it allows for the flexibility through various materials to kind of open up the space should they want to be.

SAMEER: If the want to have a little bit more openness throughout their environment or if they wanted to have a little bit more heads down focus, work and work on this kind of pairing exercise, they can kind of pull that material closed. It's essentially like an acoustical felt panel and they can, they can do their important work and so we're taking this approach across a number of projects that we are working on this year and we're not just applying Boulder situations to other offices. We're really taking the time to understand the local needs of how those employees work and how those functions work. And I think when we're able to do that successfully, we can then positively impact the culture because employees feel energized about what they're doing. I'm a little bit of what you talked about. More and more people have choice of what they can do with their employment.

SAMEER: There are so many great companies out there and there's so many mission driven companies and you know, I'm actually celebrating my sixth Twitterversary again, another Twitter acronym for you. So it's like my work anniversary today. But I've chosen to stay here because of the mission that Twitter has and what it is doing for the world. And I think you see a lot of people really reflecting on themselves and picking companies that align with their value, personal values so that they feel like they're having an impact in the world. And so it throughout our office design, not just in the functionality, but again going to that local design, making employees feel like that they're immersed in their local culture. We recently actually today opened a small space in Korea that again, very much honors tradition of what Korea is as a culture and doesn't just have a cookie cutter Twitter feel. And I think blending those two things has made us really successful.

KEVIN: That's amazing. First off, happy anniversary. That is very exciting. How long have you been at Twitter as of today?

SAMEER: So six years internally, but I actually worked three years as an external design vendor and loved it so much that I wanted to get a job. Twitter applied an d was lucky enough to get a position and I've been here ever since. Wow. Wow. Long time.

KEVIN: Wow. Long time. That's fantastic. Quick question, going off of what you just said, are there any, would you say specific metrics that you think companies should be very focused on tracking within their workplace, maybe with their employees to understand maybe their culture or their locality a little bit better. Are there any maybe specific metrics that you think are an absolute go-to for better understanding your culture?

SAMEER: You know, I don't think that there's one specific metric and I think that's because culture is such a dynamic thing. It's always evolving and changing. And so I think you have to look at a number of different things across the board to evaluate your culture. Some of that, you know, is within our EDW and some of that might not be, but I don't think you can just tie one number to something as important as culture and something that it's not made up of any one thing. It's made up of your entire employee population and that employee population is constantly changing with people that join your company. And so I think it's important to consider when you're evaluating something like culture and and thinking about how the office space can affect that, ensuring that you're thinking about the people and not just viewing it as a metric because at the end of the day we're providing office space for people and it's important to understand their needs and what they need to be successful in delivering the product that is Twitter to the world.

KEVIN: And it is. and Culture, and we've spoken about this at the conference a lot. I know Twitter has even spoken about it at the conference, which has actually been some of our top attended sessions from our San Francisco iteration, which is always very excited. But we hear that it's a challenge nowadays to effectively measure culture. And this kind of brings me to my next question as it relates to workplace strategy could be a push pull method of of yes it's harder and yes it's not. But do you find that it's harder nowadays to measure company culture because we're at a point in time where our workforce does encompass four different and distinct generations? Or would you say maybe it's getting a little bit easier to understand because of the amount of industry services now you know, surveys, workplace solutions. I know a lot of folks are coming out with different types of measurements for culture. Do you see the understanding piece of the culture for real estate and workplace strategy getting easier or harder?

SAMEER: I think it's a balance. And the reason I say that is I think all the data that we can now collect is super insightful, right? I think data is a positive. I think whether it's surveys or you know, workplace occupancy sensors, whatever it may be, data is inherently a good thing because it helps as one input. And I think that's what I would stress from my vantage point, especially when you're talking about four different generations. You can have all the data in the world, but you have to know the people and you have to build those relationships across the board and I think that's what our team has done a phenomenal job in globally is that we understand our people and we understand the vision of the company and we can then try to ensure that we are being good stewards of that. So I don't think it's just about data. I don't think it's just about not having data. I think it's using both in tandem to make good decisions for your business and for your real estate and for your culture that hopefully enact positive changes.

KEVIN: I couldn't agree more. It was a trick question. Onto a lighter question that we have been asking all of our podcasts guests. What we're doing is we're asking if you could create your ultimate dream workspace dream office, what things or what thing would be an absolute must for you...and I'll just let you know right off the bat. I have on past episodes requested for my dream office, a chocolate milkshake machine on tap. I've requested a planetarium where I can go and regulate my chi on stressful days. So with that being said, if there's, if there's anything that comes to mind that would fit in your ultimate or dream workspace, what would it be and why?

SAMEER: Yeah, I mean, I, I think, we do a pretty good job here at Twitter of providing some amazing space. But personally I'm a really big sports fan, so TV's everywhere. Showing sports is never a bad thing, but honestly, I think we're doing a good job of providing optionality to our employees and I think that's really important. So many people have so many different interests and different things that they want to achieve within the workspace and even outside the workspace. And how can we support them in those endeavors that I think, you know, we do a really good job of balancing that. I think, you know, we always have things that we can research and do differently, but I think we do a good job of balancing that and an occasional sports TV here and there wouldn't hurt my feelings at all.

KEVIN: Big sports guy myself. It would be nice to have some sort of dedicated sports room within our office to take a break and watch some games, especially around March madness. That would be amazing.

KEVIN: Sameer, that concludes our podcast, but thank you so, so much for the insights to you and the Twitter team. You guys have been phenomenal speakers at our shows in the past, had multiple site tours at your headquartered offices, which have been absolutely phenomenal. You guys have been just, just amazing attendees, speakers and hosts all around and even supporters and even chairperson, you know, I know we've had some folks on the team as chairs in the past as well. So thank you so much and we appreciate you being on the show for this episode.

SAMEER: Really appreciate you having me and been been really thankful to have attended your guys's conference and speaking. And I think you guys are doing some great stuff. You know, having a podcast. I think you're the first group that I know that's doing this, just been so appreciate all you guys are doing for pushing office environments and you know, having speakers on and sharing knowledge across the industry.

OUTRO: Absolutely Samir and again thank you for tuning in with us. Ladies and gentleman Sameer Pangrekar, the director of global design and construction and strategic projects with the real estate and workplace team at Twitter. So that concludes our episode. Again, if you missed any of our last episodes please feel free to go listen at futureofficeswinter.com/podcast and again you can find us on any other of the podcast platforms we are on everything. Feel free to follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at future offices...but even more so feel free to follow us on Twitter @officesoutlook. But thanks for tuning in and we will see you next time.

Our host Kevin Steinberger welcomes Don Watson, Vice President Global Workplace and Enterprise Services at Merck, to discuss how his company is innovating the way it approaches new workspaces.

Two traditionally, very separate departments, real estate and HR, are now working strategically in tandem. In fact, in some cases it’s HR leading the charge. There’s been some serious break down of silos at Merck all to ensure better talent acquisition and retention.

Take 20 minutes and listen to this lively and information chat.

For more information on the Future Offices Winter 2020 conference, visit www.FutureOfficesWinter.com.

This week we talk to Dr. Michelle Samura, Associate Professor of Education and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at Chapman University about her groundbreaking research on building belonging.

Listen and see how Michelle’s latest research, The Architecture of Belonging, is helping companies create better workplaces for our very diverse workforce.

This podcast series engages industry-famous experts to join host Kevin Steinberger (@kevinjsteinberger) to talk about the stuff that’s changing the face of the way we work.
#RealEstate, #Workplace, #Facilities, #HR, and #IT -- all of these traditionally siloed departments are combining forces to build a future office like you’ve never seen but need to hear about.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript:

Kevin: That's fantastic and thank you. It is very refreshing now to see the combination of different tactics and different research that is actually shaping and molding the trends for offices. And I'm seeing it now where we're starting to see even speakers from even the retail and the hospitality sector that are putting a massive influence and working with their corporate real estate teams, outfits and renovations and how that sort of all comes down to creating better human experience within these spaces. I've mentioned this before, Michelle, you do bring something very special to this conversation and you are, I would say one of our, in my eyes, one of our out of the box titled speakers at the show. And with saying that as a dean and an academic who is sought after for speaking engagements, obviously elsewhere obviously from myself for this conference, how does your specific role and your title mesh with the corporate real estate workplace and HR sector?

Michelle: Well, I'm glad you asked that because I could imagine as people are scrolling through speaker bios and seeing some incredible speakers and workshop leaders who are industry giants, VPs, and HR and workplace strategy of facilities and corporate real estate. And then all of a sudden they get to an associate professor and associate dean of education and I'm sure people are wondering what I'm doing in this space. And so I'm glad I have an opportunity to address that. So I'm drawn to the spaces in between, so in between disciplines, in between institutions, in between groups, and I really enjoy making unconventional connections. In fact, recently I've been involved in some exciting work to bring together leaders from the education community and business community here in Orange County in order to develop and retain local talent across multiple sectors in order to continue to ensure a thriving economy in our region.

But for my research, my interest in making these unconventional connections has meant drawing upon and combining insights and approaches from typically disparate fields such as education, geography, visual sociology. I use photography and image analysis as a method, urban planning, architecture and design in order to understand the development of belonging and community. My in-betweenness also has meant that my research insights can inform a number of contexts, certainly the traditional educational settings such as classrooms and campuses, but also as you stated workplace settings including the corporate real estate and HR world. And I know I bring a different perspective to the corporate world with insights that not only address the interplay between the physical environment and social interactions, but also give serious consideration to diversity. And so, while there's certainly a compelling body of research that clearly indicates the benefits of diversity and a range of settings including educational settings in workplace settings to name a few, organizations of all sorts still struggle how to develop inclusive environments.

By using this spatial approach, my research offers both a way to understand and to address issues of diversity, belonging and inclusion. And to add one more thing about bridging work I'm doing between higher ed and workplace settings, I'm conducting another related study that's focused on the major disconnects between life stages and the spaces that people inhabit during those stages. So think about the transitions between even kindergarten to first grade, from kindergarten open play more opportunities for students to just explore to first grade where oftentimes you walk into classrooms where things are very set, in some cases, rows of desks that students are now having to sit in and then transitions from elementary to middle school or high school that those shifts, high school to college, college to workplace, even workplace to retirement. And if we zoom in on that high school to workplace or even college to workplace transition, there's still so much work to be done to inform both the college and workplace settings on expectations of students as they become employees and the support and training individuals would need during that transition.

Kevin: Wow, thank you. And it's so refreshing to be able to bridge higher ed in this space. And we're starting to see even some new job titles and very different job titles coming into all of the workplace events, not even just Future Offices. And there's so many out there now and it's great to see sort of the innovation amongst sectors now, the different titles, the different titles that the companies working together now seeing a very large spike in the HR teams that are now working with facilities teams and these workplace visionaries at some of these major companies. Question for you, what are you seeing as the main obstacles to feeling a sense of belonging? And I'm very interested in this question because I think this is something everyone can relate to, everyone who is in the workforce, who is in the even the commercial sector. So again, what are you seeing as the main obstacles to feeling a sense of belonging?

Michelle: So I actually think that one of the main obstacles is how people view the concept of belonging. There are some who suggest that belonging is about fitting in, so how individuals fit or don't fit. Others think of belonging as a feeling or a state of being. And in fact the way that a number of researchers capture data on belonging contributes to the view of belonging as a state of being. So if you ask a survey question, like on a scale of one to five, how much do you belong? It's a useful data point, but it's a static data point at a particular moment in time about a certain context.

Michelle: I instead view belonging as a process more specifically an interactional process. And this means then that belonging requires effort. It requires work, maintenance on both the part of the individual as well as the group or organization. And I also think there are a lot of misconceptions about who belongs with whom or what. For example, person A looks like person B, therefore person A and B likely will have things in common or want to be around each other. And this isn't to say that that couldn't be the case. What I'm saying is that we need to check our assumptions about to whom or what we think people want to belong.

Kevin: Amazing. And as soon as you said that, I started thinking about maybe what my even personal definition of belonging would be especially in the workplace. And in a very facetious way for me it might just be another redhead coming into the company and us just having that connection as redheads on the office floor. That would do it for me. Yeah. But in all seriousness, let's talk disconnects that you're seeing, especially with how space might hinder belonging.

Michelle: Right. So this is an area that I'm investigating right now. And to kind of give an example on a certain aspect of this, existing research indicates that familiarity may have an effect on belonging. And I'll use an example from some of my research. So this will focus on college students to explain this further, but I think there are some concepts and insights that are applicable across different settings. So as part of the data I collect in student housing and residence halls, I asked students to draw maps of their own residence hall, and then we collectively analyze them. And there've been numerous times when students would draw a picture of double loaded corridors, long hallways with rooms on both sides and then drawing question marks at both ends of the hallway or whatever sides of the hallway. And more often than not, these are the students who then go on to indicate that they experienced less belonging than say the students who are able to write in the names of all their roommates or floor mates.

And now the design of double loaded quarters actually is intended to facilitate interactions, which would then lead to greater familiarity. But we can't assume that the space alone we'll do what it was designed to do. In fact, it could sometimes do quite the opposite, such as creating greater isolation as in the case of some of the students in my study. So we need to consider how space can be activated. What programs, policies, even spatial cues that I mentioned earlier could be integrated to align with the spatial design and perhaps lead to fuller realization in the design intention? And this is when viewing belonging as an interactional process as something that requires effort and deliberate intentionality from both the individual and the institution comes into play.

At Future Offices Winter 2020, January 22 - 24 at Convene 225 Liberty Street, Dr. Samura will have her own session expanding on what we talked about in this podcast. Join her session:

Building Belonging: Designing Inclusive Workplace Experiences
How can a spatial approach to understanding workplace experiences strengthen your company’s climate? How might your workplace more effectively facilitate belonging? And how can diverse voices and perspectives of key stakeholders inform these efforts? The purpose of the “Building Belonging” workshop is to engage participants around these questions and explore how a spatial approach to examining belonging and inclusion in the workplace can help decision makers better understand and address the needs of diverse stakeholders.

Key Takeaways:
Workshop participants will gain interdisciplinary insights and an understanding of research-based approaches that emphasize diverse personnel perspectives in order to more effectively design and support inclusive workplaces. As a result of participating in this session, attendees will be able to identify possible design elements in their respective workplace settings to enhance belonging.

Dr. Michelle Samura is Associate Professor and Associate Dean in the Attallah College of Educational Studies at Chapman University. She also is the founding Co-Director of the Collaborate Initiative and principal investigator of the Architecture of Belonging project. Dr. Samura conducts research, publishes, and speaks on the relationship between space and belonging. For the past 15 years, she has studied diverse student experiences on college campuses and is currently is gaining insights from the fields of design and architecture on key design principles and elements of built environments that promote belonging in educational, workplace, and community settings.