Client: University of Zurich
Year: 2025
Our Services: Innovation Consulting, Participation Workshops, Development of an Academic Learning, Teaching and Research Environment

The IEA Workspace Pioneers stand for new forms of collaboration in science. With this project, the University of Zurich at Irchel is testing forward-looking concepts for space and work as a basis for the upcoming refurbishment of the buildings. The decisive factor: all perspectives came to the table. Operations managers, professors, research associates, postdocs, PhDs and Master's students discussed together how the university of the future should work, research and learn. In this way, the IEA Workspace was deliberately conceived differently: less labyrinth, less one-size-fits-all, less status-based allocation of space. And instead, more collaboration, more flexibility, more transparency and an efficient use of resources. It is particularly fitting that these principles are being implemented, of all places, at the Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology. For research shows: it is only because we learned to cooperate flexibly in large groups that we humans have shaped the world (Yuval Noah Harari).