Designing a Work Space that Embodies Your Brand
Recently, LUNAR, a Bay Area design company relocated their office to a new location. Nearly a decade ago, the company opened an experimental location away form their Palo Alto headquarters in San Francisco. The experiment proved to be a success, however, the physical environment of the office was not.
That is when the decision was made relocate to a new office near the design epicenter of San Francisco, adjacent to Potrero Hill. LUNAR’s President John Edson considers the new space to be an absolute success and from his experience shares three tips for embodying your brand within the workplace.
1. Express your Voice:
“A workplace is as much an opportunity to express who you are as a company as it is a functional place to get work done. This is an important chance to put your brand into three-dimensions, to surround yourselves with personality and character, to create some theater for your prospective employees and partners. At LUNAR, we achieved the first and foremost by picking a building with history. This could be considered cheating, but we’re not afraid to admit it. The bones of the building -- the straight forward layout, the authentic materials, the south-facing natural light -- made a rich and warm canvas for our vision. In fact, much of our renovation aimed to reclaim views of the brick and timber construction hidden behind an overzealous use of drywall.”
2. Embody your Values:
“In concert with creating a distinctive voice in the space, it’s crucial to identify the fundamentals of function: who goes where, what goes here, how should one get there. This is where user engagement is of vital importance. For us and our culture, we chose to sit in an open floor plan resembling a newsroom. From the CEO to interns, we share the same sightlines. The benefit is that cross-fertilization is turbo charged. The team shares greater awareness about what others are doing and it’s easier to create channels of learning and communication that lead to better design outcomes.”
3. Build a Stage, Not the Set:
“We wanted to create a space that would evolve as we learned how to optimize it from living and working in it. To create a design that could “learn,” We shelved plans to build custom furniture and dividers for the individual workstations, the co-lab (our project specific work area), and conference rooms. Not only did this save us money at a time of some pretty big cash outlays, it’s allowing us to continuously innovate how we use the space. The building itself is delightful to be in and the built features leave plenty of open space for experimental layout of furniture and dividers. We’ll construct more precious furniture and fixtures once we have more clarity about our needs and preferences – and even then, we won’t build anything that can’t be upgraded, improved, reconfigured or summarily ripped out.”
Post your comment
Comments
No one has commented on this page yet.
RSS feed for comments on this page | RSS feed for all comments