VMware
May 08, 2020

In the world of employment centuries ago, efficiency was the guiding principle and ‘time and motion’ were the measures of success.

The idea was conceived in an era of command and control, the traditional fixed and hierarchical office is rapidly evolving to embrace more fluid and intuitive ways of working.

In that spirit, we at Stoked constantly push the norm by innovating spaces to suit not only the specific needs but challenge the next.

We have recently completed the visitor briefing centre for VMware, a virtualization and cloud computing storage solution provider.

We carried out an experiential-based approach, catering to the three functions required in the space – a welcome lounge to host the visitors, an immersion lounge whereby possibilities and solutions are discussed, and a boardroom for an in-depth discussion for VMware’s product capabilities.

Knowing that the office must become a place for advantageous meetings, we needed to build spaces that would create or orchestrate planned or unplanned encounters that will be crucially important for continued success of the organisation.

We believe that the future typology of the office will represent a more dynamic organisation, accommodating the business constant change through it’s inherent flexibility and the ability to load-balance space.

One of the challenges that we took on and transformed into a great experiential opportunity was to create a spatial experience that resonates with the product’s vision of “any application, any device, anywhere”.

Compared to the olden days or other rigid industries, the working day here should no longer start with a bell or the stamp of a time card for most office workers, but the blurring of the boundaries and the spheres of their constricted job scopes.

Thanks to technology and globalization, these two boons have greatly transformed the nature of where, when and how work will take place.

Our strategy was to incorporate all these aspects into the spaces that we were working on. We reviewed the techniques of place-making and identified the three areas people spend most of their time in their daily lives- their home, transit, and office.

Exploring how we can integrate those three typology of spaces into the welcome lounge. We dissected and studied various forms, materials, and visual cues that would intuitively suggest these experiences.

Very few innovators pushed the boundaries which recognized that office work was diverse and that people could sit together in non-hierarchical workspace, a long shot from the yesteryears.

These typology of spaces draw attention to the fact that the diversity of spaces affects the type of tolerance in place.

When we think about tolerance, it’s important to think in a spatialised way, referring to these different property regimes.

Toleration implies some forms of acceptance in the plurality of good ideas and lifestyles.

It is also a principle of peaceful coexistence between individuals or groups that have irrefutable differences in ways of life, habits, and practices.

Upholding tolerance, the result is a stimulating tension between the unifying of different places within one volume of space, the material layers of walls and the forms that define that and the thresholds in these layers framing visual and physical access to adjacent spaces.

As firm believers that the future typology of the office will represent a more agile and dynamic organisation, and we are in the business of making it so, and more.

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