At the University of Illinois Incubator Lab in Champaign, labs are on the outside of the building and services run down the main pedestrian corridor.

Inside the daylit labs, all the casework is in the middle of the space, resting on wheels. “We call it a dance floor,” says Jeff Strohmeyer, a senior HOK lab designer.

Services are supplied from above in a plug-and-play environment. Over the course of an afternoon, staff can easily transform the space to accommodate new scientific equipment or additional experiments. In just a day or two -- with minimal help from maintenance personnel -- the research staff can completely transform a lab from a wet chemistry focus, for example, to one for electronics research.