The office - part II

May 13th, 2008
The office - part II

Right now it’s not more than two weeks until the building and decoration of the new office will start so it’s about time to present The idea.

Friends waiting for the new office.

Mostly when setting up an office you tend to build it in a strict hierarchic way; everything centers around your current work/desk, orbiting around that is the stuff you need to get your current work done. At the outskirts of the office is the rest of the stuff; books, inspirational material, music, colladorative spaces and hopefully some decorative details.

But why do you put the current work in the center? why do you let one place be the center of the office?

A lot of agencys I have visited is full of dead spaces. They are flawless designed and filled with Aarnio, Eames, Jacobsen, Miller and more. But the spaces feels like show-off areas for visitors than having a purpose/advantage for the people working at the agency. The result is that the spaces feels totally dead. Beautiful, expensive, modern but totally dead. You don’t feel at home in those spaces, you don’t feel welcome there. You are intruding the facade of the agency.

The idea with our new office is to build 3-4 different spaces that serves 3-4 different purposes, and then complete those with one not so centered workplace.

The result that I want is spaces that is in contrast to each other so that if you need to get out of your box and restart with new ideas the spaces will help you change direction of thought. They will take you away from the inboxes, to-do-lists, code-views and milestones.

To be continued with Part III “The Plan”

This is part two in my series of posts about the new Nofont office. You can find Part I, “The Office part I”, here.