IDEO Shanghai Office

What started as a design brief for working spaces mostly behind enclosed rooms evolved into a realization that office spaces can be like schools, and working as learning and sharing. IDEO’s Shanghai office found a great opportunity to expand with an entire five-story, refurbished building in the Columbia Circle historic redevelopment area. With no changes allowed to the floor plate, structure, stairs, elevator, and WC cores, the challenge however, is to find a way to encourage physical interaction between the self-sufficient floors as well as more mobility even within each floor. Furthermore, how to balance a company identity and consistency across five floors, and yet still create enough diversity beyond the repetitive office tower experience becomes a crucial need for both the management as well as the IDEO community. To increase inter-floor interactions, the concept is to insert a key communal space as the clear center of each floor immediately upon arrival, and to pair a range of working spaces all around so the experience is unified and truly a part of the core space, like working inside a library, or working inside a work shop. The diversity between the floors will then naturally emerge out of the personality and spatial types of these programs as opposed to an overly differentiated design intervention per floor. First floor is the most public, where IDEO’s desire for more community engagement culminates into an amphitheater, with the entry sequenced by a gallery atrium, a bar as reception, and street facing gallery corridor. Second floor consolidates the design resources and project curatorial into a library, surrounded by smaller working areas for people to focus, a hot desk café seating area, and a flexible video conference room that can fully open and merge with the large space. Third floor, at the heart of IDEO’s spirit of making things, is almost entirely a woodshop environment, with rooms and open desks intermixed as part of the shop, where the designers can flexibly step in and out. Fourth floor is about a break in nature, like a moment in a park, pulling up all the greenery moments from other floors, and placing working spaces, quiet rooms, and glass box meeting rooms amidst trees and plants as a moment away from the typical desk, to take one’s minds away, to get inspired. Fifth floor is the food hall, where everyone can mingle and share in a more casual setting, with additional yoga rooms, dart areas, gaming, as well as a multipurpose sprint room that can fully close and open to the big space. All together, the spaces and interactions between them become more and more like moments in a school, back to the nature of working, exploring, sharing, and learning together.