Reimagining the office
Why are offices designed the way they are? Are there better ways to create more efficient workplaces?
Cubicles, whiteboards, glass walls, and watercoolers; there are many features of the traditional office layout that have become tropes for how we think about workspaces.
Thanks largely to a corporate lack of imagination, and laziness when it comes to design, the basic layout of offices has remained largely unchanged since the 1980s. However, we live in a vastly different world now, both technologically and professionally, and it’s time that our office spaces reflected that.
We at Redfern have been designing new office layouts and decor for over 20 years, and in that time we’ve always tried to stay at the cutting edge of design. However, with the constant fear that we might fall into the same design traps of other companies, we decided recently to take a radically new look at how we approach office design.
How to bring our workspaces into the 21st century
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Changing our approach
The first step in finding a new approach to office design was unlearning everything we thought we knew about how an office should be built. This meant radically critiquing every aspect of design that might be otherwise taken for granted by designers.
Next, we began to start from the ground up, considering what were the truly crucial elements of office design, and which could be excluded without risk to the ability of the place to function.