Design Infrastructure for Large Organizations

How may design address the conditions of change and creativity in today's workplace environment? Increasingly there is the recognition that in order to develop effective workplaces, the design not only needs to respond to functional requirements but also increase the role of the individual users and suppliers in the ongoing evolution of the office space. Expanding the level of participation in the design and decision-making process increases the level of complexity and requires the re-evaluation of existing design conventions. If the design team chooses to meaningfully engage in these matters, then issues such as the relationship between individual identity and organizational culture, coordination and distribution of resources, and consideration of perceptions and changing behaviors necessarily need to be addressed. The assessment and formulation of these issues generates the basis for this architectural investigation on a collaborative design process in the workplace. The investigation begins by examining conventional design paradigms in order to articulate some of the limitations in the design process as currently practiced by architects and designers. In particular, design processes that clearly delineate the providers (manufacturers, designers, consultants) from the users (organizations and the employees) are seen as problematic due to the fact that the end users themselves are often excluded from important decision-making transactions. What is needed is an alternative design approach that can engage individual users to continuously shape their office needs and environments within parameters of a negotiated framework. Despite the added complexity, it is argued that this direction is critical in providing an ongoing and systematic process to accommodate for user interventions and design innovation in today's networked office. Several design exercises serve to illustrate this alternative approach and its possible impact on the physical spaces in progressive office organizations. These exercises emphasize the visual aspects of communicating temporal relationships, behaviors and design processes. Specific scenarios are also investigated exploring new dynamics and their ability to affect the physical qualities of the design outcomes. By developing a more distributed and iterative approach, the thesis aims to create a new model of workplace design that can foster new interactions, innovation, effective evaluation and collaboration. Thesis Supervisor: Peter Testa Title: Associate Professor of Architecture I ~ V UPRh tkilHN Ahm Lv'. ~ CONTENTS 5 INTRODUCTION: RAPID EVOLUTION IN WORKPLACE ENVIRONMENTS 7 EXERCISE: SCENES FROM THE OFFICE 10 EXERCISE: MAPPING THE CONVENTIONAL PROCESS OF DESIGN 11 DESIGN AS AN ACTIVE AGENT IN THE WORKPLACE 13 EXERCISE: DYNAMIC 3D VISUALIZATIONS 17 DESIRED DESIGN OUTCOMES FOR THE NEW WORKPLACE 19 EXERCISE: STILLS FROM A VIDEO 21 TOWARDS A NEW SPATIAL PLANNING MODEL 22 DESIGNING THE RESPONSE: THE DESIGN INFRASTRUCTURE THE NETWORKED COMMUNITY MATERIAL INNOVATIONS ONGOING COMMITMENT FOR COLLABORATION 27 EXERCISE: DESIGNING THE PROTOTYPE