Architect Jeanne Gang used a game-like mapping tool to help lawyers redesign their office for the National Resource Defense Council. The interactive tool let them experiment with open-plan layouts and workstation sizes, revealing trade-offs and turning a difficult transition into a discovery process that aligned design goals with what users actually needed.
Chapters
It's almost like you have to design the tool to enable your partner, your client to help, to be able to be a designer, because many people aren't trained as a designer. This was a renovation and a new office for the headquarters for the National Resource Defense Council and a bunch of attorneys that usually had their offices closed in with doors. And because we were going for a really great sustainability rating, a LEED Platinum and also a living billing challenge, which is really hard to get, we needed to get everyone out of their offices and out into an open floor. So we realized that this was going to be very hard for the attorneys to do, and they knew it was going to be hard. And so we didn't want to be the bad guy that said, hey, you guys don't get an office anymore. So we brought a tool to them to use, which was basically just this game like Map. And we cut out workstations of different sizes and then we literally let them arrange them in the way that they wanted to. And what was really interesting about the exercises, they started to understand the trade offs and the things that they were going to, the benefits. These are like the different ones, we photographed these at the end, the different ones that they really came up with. So it was kind of a discovery process and it really helped to facilitate and move the project forward in a way that was beneficial to them and to us.
