CHICAGO — A workspace may appear worthy of a magazine spread, but if employees don’t have the freedom to move things around and get a little messy, it’s not doing its job.
So says Tim Swanson, CannonDesign’s Chicago office practice leader, who took over the role in September. He oversees Chicago’s 200-person outpost of the global design firm, where he also leads its City Design Practice. He joined CannonDesign in 2012 when the firm acquired Peter Ellis New Cities, where Swanson was an associate VP of urban strategy and design.
CannonDesign’s team has used its own space at Illinois Center — which features an open design and numerous options for alternative workplace — to prototype workplace strategies for other offices. The company has built workspaces for companies such as Flexera Software, Zurich North America and Follett.
The firm also worked to build out a new west side campus for Malcolm X College — using design principles to rethink how a city college could educate 21st century workers, Swanson said.
Blue Sky spoke with Swanson about using data and a watchful eye to build out spaces that allow for creative work and working creatively.
Q: What are some of the ways CannonDesign collects information before building out workspaces?
A: It’s a lot of digging into any data those organizations might have. It’s a lot of on-the-ground analysis and assessment. It’s surveys and stakeholder interviews, tracking where people go and how they go, really understanding their use of space. Trying to marry up — as best we can — the way performance metrics suggest how people work with how those people perceive themselves working. I think that duality is incredibly important.
And then we do a lot of follow-up. We track with those organizations. We look at perception shifts and attitude shifts over six months and a year and two years, etc.; really watching how those organizations rethink themselves and how their populations settle into the new norms that are created.
Q: How are you using sensors to help with your work?
A: We do track anonymized data … and we’ve used sensors to really track and understand those ebbs and flows. Because the reality is someone might tell you this is how they work, but then as you’re a fly on the wall, you realize they work wildly differently. Part of our responsibility is to help them see the way that they are working and the way tools could better suit them.
If I were to ask you where you spend your time during the day, and then I were to track where you actually spend your time during the day, we start to see very different responses. It just requires us to bridge that gap to help you understand that, no, in fact you don’t spend 50 percent of your time in the open collaborative space, you tend to spend it over here.
So what is it? Your mind says you spend more time over here, obviously you desire to spend more time over here. What does this space over here not have that keeps you back at your desk?
Q: What’s next for office design?
A: The most important thing, at least from my perspective, is giving folks the agency to use the space both in ways it was intended and maybe ways it wasn’t intended. That was a lesson we had to learn in our office. It was about empowering people and allowing people to use things differently than we created them for.
Somebody dragging a table across a floor to arrange it a little bit differently to work in a more comfortable way for their team is actually all right. In fact, that’s what you would seek to have happen.
What I do see a lot of is making certain there is a comfort level from day one that people can and should own their space. And in order to do so, have a little bit of leeway to craft it, adjust it, tweak it, push it, pull it accordingly. It can look wildly creative and have a really great glossy spread in a magazine, but if people can’t work creatively within that space, then it doesn’t quite count.
Q: I’ve also heard of companies with fancy game rooms or other casual areas that are perpetually empty.
A: I’ve seen that too many times to count. ‘Look, we have a game room, so therefore we’re hip and creative.’ But no one’s allowed to play games. So is it to woo new talent but not allow (current employees) to use it? And then I’ve seen places where in a back service hallway somebody has set up a table tennis table and folks play there to vent for 10 minutes at a time. So the space isn’t designed at all for table tennis, but the culture was designed for it. It has to go hand-in-hand.
Q&A’s are edited for length and clarity.
