The first wrong decision in an office project is made long before opening a floor plan: when the furniture is chosen before understanding how people work. Space enables specific behaviours – it makes them easy or makes them inaccessible. That is why the sequence has to be reversed: the data first, then the layout.
The starting point: the typical day
Through interviews and surveys we reconstruct the typical day of every team. How much of the day goes to focused individual work, how much to collaboration and of what kind – between two people, in a group, informally or in a structured way – and how much time is spent off-site. From the survey both stated and latent needs emerge: the ones people declare and the ones the space has to accommodate even when nobody names them explicitly. We report the results back to management: it is from the discussion of this data that the vision for the new space takes shape.
From data to macro layout
The survey produces figures and proportions. From there you build the macro layout: the choice of where to place the individual work areas, the collaborative ones and the support areas – meeting rooms, spaces for calls, transition zones. The macro layout is not a layout: it is a map of the relationships between functions. Turning those figures into workstations, work settings and square metres is the job of the ARCHIlabs proprietary software, developed over more than twenty years and across 2.7 million square metres of design work. The BOMA standard provides the objective basis for sizing spaces in a measurable way, without relying on estimates or industry habits. It is the first document on which shared decisions are made, before a single centimetre is drawn.
The work settings and space planning
Once the macro layout is defined, the work settings are designed – the ingredients of space planning, one for each activity recorded by the survey. A work setting is not furniture: it is the combination of spatial, acoustic and technological features that makes a given activity possible. Only at this point do you move into space planning, then interior design, and finally delivery. Each stage produces a deliverable that the client approves: the journey is sequential and without shortcuts, and the choices are made in order.
A multidisciplinary team, all the way through delivery
Designing well is not enough if delivery then scatters the choices that were made. That is why ARCHIlabs brings together the skills an office project requires: architects, engineers – mechanical and electrical – urban planners and specialist figures. In this way the design integrates the spatial, systems and regulatory aspects from the very start. During delivery the studio manages every stage: works supervision, art direction, testing and specialist activities. A single point of contact accompanies the project from the first data point through to handover, keeping consistency between what has been drawn and what is built.
Where this journey leads
An office designed in this order is measurable: you know how many workstations, what mix of spaces, what density. You also know what you are choosing when you depart from the data. The result can be an Activity-Based office, a Community Based one, or something in between – the form depends on the data collected, not on an aesthetic preference or a passing trend.