insight
Celebrating our Newest Staff Promotions
The MA Interior Design team is excited to share our latest office space – the Co-Creation Room – a creative collaboration with our partners at Dupler Office and Allsteel Furniture.
Watch the video for your own virtual experience of the space, and to hear from the design experts themselves on concepts and considerations behind the creativity.
In the wake of the pandemic MA, Dupler and Allsteel worked together as a team to decide, define, and design what the greatest need of the office of the future would be. With connection, communication, and collaboration clearly being the most important characteristics of business success, and the hardest to emulate through virtual environments alone, it became quickly clear the office space would be most valued as a place to co-create.
Brandon Dupler, Founder + President of Dupler Office, shares, “We see in our research that 87% of the folks feel the office is important for collaborating, innovating, and mostly building strong relationships.”
This room represents a smaller version of a larger concept – a cultural hub – that our Innovation + Research and Interior Design teams are designing for the future for our most progressive clients.
With the reality of some version of hybrid work remaining, with reports proving 93% of companies globally are reporting plans to permanently change remote work and meeting policies post-pandemic, this gathering place will serve as the defining space for the workplace of the future.
MA’s Director of Experiential Design, Alicia Orlando, notes, “Creating a destination was something that we wanted to hone in on. So, creating spaces that we don’t have in the other areas of the office was something that was a complete focus.”
It’s about choice, comfort, and control. And this room really provides all three, not only to us but our clients as well—it’s open for others to use. It really is co-creation and coming together.
There is a giant need for an amenity space like this, and that need is there because I feel like people want to collaborate, want to be back, and it’s up to us to provide a safe place to do so.
This is the future of the workspace because it allows the user to not be prescriptive for the meeting. The meetings can change. It doesn’t have to be the same thing every space where we have to fit into the space that we’re in. The space will adapt to our needs.
As heard in the video, these are the five driving principles of return to office that must be considered both from a design and a human-centric change management perspective:
1. User experience. What attracts us to the office? The goal is to create an experience for our folks to come to the office, to build relationships, and drive company culture.
2. Autonomy and choice. We know we can work anywhere. In our space, it’s important for folks to come to our office and have flexibility of choice where they sit, whether it’s in their dedicated space, or in great collaborative spaces like this.
3. Adaptability. Not only in flexibility where we work but flexibility in how we integrate and design our new physical environment to help support the new way we work. And also, that it evolves and supports the work in the future that we don’t even know how to design for yet.
4. Reimagining the workplace. We’re seeing creative, innovative products that help users reconfigure and set the space however they would like to use to create their best work.
5. Hybrid work model. It’s not just about the days I’m in the office or out of the office, it’s truly about building a workforce that can work remotely from anywhere on any given day. It’s about the technology that connects us and enables us to do our best work.