BBGM Director of Workplace Interiors Alfred Gooden recently authored an op-ed piece for Work Design Magazine, Design Your Workplace Like The Kindergarten Class Of Your Memories, providing valuable insight on concepts derived from typical space usage in kindergarten classes and how these concepts can be applied in Workplace Design.
An excerpt from the article:
“My inspiration for designing workplace environments begins with those basic human experiences and developed when studying our earliest life experiences of being flexible yet organized, but most importantly being productive. I began to identify how we can incorporate those early instinctive behaviors into today’s workplace design strategies and looked no farther than our very earliest group activity – kindergarten. This comparison first came to me when I was visiting friends in Germany. I was picking up their son from kindergarten and it was here that I observed the ways that kids interact with each other, how they used the space, and how it changed throughout the day for different activities. I walked away with the revelation that a kindergarten space strategy and layout is not that different from how adults use a productive workplace. In the past, office design was developed by utilizing corporate interior standards established based on individual entitlement or position, instead of focusing on the task, function and the occupant’s use of that space. This is where the kindergarten theory comes into “play”– the space in which you spend your time in – whether as a kid or an adult – is directly associated with the activity. Adjacencies and the location of spaces are to be convenient and intuitive to the function and be a sequence of the daily activities. So how do we design our workplaces to mirror the classrooms of our younger years?”
BBGM has worked with organizations around the world in creating state-of-the-art workplace environments. BBGM’s methodology for the execution of successful services is based on more than 30 years of collaborative commercial experience. Our specialized Workplace Interiors Group is renowned for creating design solutions that incorporate sustainability and reflect a unique inspiration for each individual project.
