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home / programmes / research associates / 2003 / places please
Greg Epps / Architecture and Interiors
places please:
a temporary environment to enhance team working
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How many of us have tried to generate new ideas at work in meeting rooms that are boring, nondescript and unfit for such a dynamic purpose?
In today's learning organisations, there is a growing emphasis on team working to create new intellectual capital. But the spaces in which project teams are expected to work tend to impede rather than enhance this process. It is a fact that elaborate working customs are often performed within the most uninspiring of settings.
But what if a meeting space could be temporarily transformed with a self-assembly system of architectural components, in order to intensify the shared learning experience? What if a project space could be developed to structure the team's creative process and display new ideas on its surfaces?
These are the questions addressed by RCA architecture graduate Greg Epps in a collaborative project with global office furniture company Steelcase and innovation consultancy IDEO.
Managing ideas
Epps, a Research Associate since autumn 2001, believes that the current banality of office meeting space undermines what teams are trying to achieve. He explains: "There must be better ways to combine space and objects to help organisations work more effectively and manage ideas with greater imagination."
In the first year of the project, Epps observed collaborative behaviour by managers from Toyota and Halifax Bank of Scotland during business simulations at Cranfield School of Management. He translated their team dynamics into acts, scenes, characters, props, set, lighting and special effects - and extracted seven key rituals (from 'getting into character' to 'lap of honour').
The result of this phase was a detailed understanding of the rituals of meetings, articulated in a formal setting of heightened theatricality. The second year of the study sought to translate that understanding into heightened usability, moving away from a scripted setting based on a theatrical metaphor to a more flexible and improvisatory use of familiar objects.
As he began building the components of the new system, Greg Epps visited Steelcase's research and development facility in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to share ideas. He then tested early prototypes on 'live' sites in London with a management consultancy refurbishing its workplace and with a team of nomadic curators setting up office in a gallery space.
Rapid deployment
By combining products from the home, the workplace and the film set in new ways to transform a generic meeting space, Epps created the rapid-deployment framework for a more engaging project space to share ideas. "What is significant," says Terry West, Steelcase Inc's Director of Workplace Futures Europe, "is that the assembly of the space becomes a team-building event. This project really goes to the heart of the dynamics of collaboration."
There are six prototypes in the system. The Rollout Set combines a clothes rail with a photographic backdrop to provide a flexible enclosure that can be written on. This component allows the project space to expand and contract in response to the number of participants.
The Portal, or 'front door', is a large cabinet or storage 'block' that provides a fixed threshold to a fluid project space. Its drawers slide out to form a Props Trolley containing all the required tools and refreshments.
The Tablet unfolds like a wallpaper table to create a work-surface that can be used as a vertical or horizontal display. This aspect works with the Chandelier, a device that combines an overhead projector lens and make-up mirror with car radio antennae to scale up ideas in the space and magnify social gestures. Finally, the Rotator adapts the domestic clothes drier to display and circulate ideas on a rotating tri-light structure.
