by Sascha Wagner, IIDA CID LEED AP
swagner@huntsmanag.com
(featured in Contract magazine, May 2015)

Today’s cutting-edge office interiors for technology companies—open, creative, and amenity-rich—seem to be universally envied. This new paradigm perhaps even signals the future for traditional fields, like banking or law. Before accepting the tech office trends as the de facto basis for every future workplace, it is worth pursuing which features provide meaningful enhancements to well-being, culture, and productivity and which are just passing fads.

How tech companies really work
To understand the way tech spaces work at both a functional and cultural level, we first need to look at the drivers that have gotten us to this point in office design. Everything changed with the smartphone. Having a pocket-size supercomputer liberated the workforce from desks and office buildings. For tech-enabled workers, and indeed for most of the first-world population, the problem is no longer getting access to information or connectivity; it is filtering massive amounts of interactions.

Other drivers for tech workspaces are new collaborative and information-sharing models, including open-source product development, coworking, virtual or augmented reality, and rapid prototyping—all of which are influencing the pace of innovation and the way teams need to work now: fast, smart, connected, and collaborative. 

The design of built spaces has already been influenced by Millennials’ preference for democratic team structures, so it’s not surprising that the individual workspace is less of a status symbol. Mark Zuckerberg famously sits in the open among Facebook engineers, and many other tech CEOs don’t have assigned desks. Tech companies also use different ways to measure performance. Netflix, for example, empowers employees to largely manage their own time, provided they meet their job responsibilities. It’s what you produce, 
not where you are, that matters.


• Focus on wellness and sustainability. Providing bike storage supports a healthier commute. A place to exercise or meditate, height-adjustable desks, good ventilation, access to daylight and outdoor spaces, and toxin-free construction materials are all essentials of a healthy workplace. Operable windows can reduce both heating and cooling costs. 

Food also plays a key role. At the office of Kaiser Permanente’s Thrive group, healthful food and snack options are supplemented with regular cooking and nutrition classes to help staff make better lifestyle choices. When employee wellness is a driver for office design, increased productivity usually follows.

While these concepts may seem like obvious positives, industries outside of tech have been slower to follow suit. Implementing collaborative design principles in traditional organizations often involves concerns about maintaining information privacy, navigating and managing regulatory requirements, and breaking down reporting structures. Since shifts in demographics and mobility will eventually affect every industry, it’s time to adapt or be left behind. Creating a more progressive workspace means asking hard questions and challenging the entrenched hierarchies and models of corporate workflow and space utilization.

Clients expect creativity, competitive pricing, speed, technical proficiency, and competent project delivery, so designers are positioned to have the most strategic impact at the front end of the project. When a client hires a designer, one key consideration should be the designer’s ability to listen and then synthesize what they learned. Understanding an organization’s culture is a designer’s most valuable contribution.

Design is too frequently perceived as a commodity, and built space as a mere operational expense. To demonstrate tangible value, successful designers shift the conversation toward the role interiors play at a strategic level. This means emphasizing not only how a space will look or function but how people connect to it emotionally. Beyond merely looking cool, the best tech workspaces truly engage employees and amplify the organization’s culture, ultimately impacting the bottom line—and that should be the goal for every office interior as well.