An innovative working environment is being developed for School of Arts, Design and Architecture
13.06.2014
In autumn 2013, the School of Arts, Design and Architecture (Aalto ARTS) instigated a participatory development project involving staff and students. The aim of the project was to conceptualise the office space of the future, which will then be realised as part of the new Aalto ARTS building complex on the University's Otaniemi campus.
‘The new building represents a massive opportunity for reinvention and renewal. We chose to take a participatory approach to the design and planning in order to work out spatial solutions that better support our activities and strategy,’ Project Manager Tapio Koskinen explains.
The project was intended to produce designs for inspirational and interactive working and learning environments that also use space more efficiently.
‘The utilisation rate of our current spaces is as low as 20 % and this has significant ecological and economic implications for us. We've got to think about how spaces can better support and foster interaction – getting people to meet one another – and multi-disciplinary collaboration and cooperation. For example, there's a big need for students to have spaces for different types and sizes of group and project work,’ Koskinen continues.
The concept work was carried out as a collaborative and open process with members of the Aalto ARTS community. This involved workshops, field trips to the new working environments, and a crowdsourcing survey that produced a wide range of ideas for developing spaces in the new premises and across the whole campus. An open workplace seminar was also organised, with domestic and international experts invited to talk about new working environment solutions and research in the field. In addition, all the heads of department and some of the service managers were individually interviewed. A student project was also carried out. This project used user profiles to examine the spatial needs of the students over the course of a day on the campus.
New solutions promote interaction
The final outcome of the working environments project is an activity-based office concept. The workstations in the new Aalto ARTS office spaces are located in common team rooms, but it is also possible to work in many other spaces too. The team rooms support the project rooms, meeting areas and quiet areas intended for concentrated work, private phone calls, and virtual meetings. At the heart of the office space lie the working cafés, which can be found in the middle of every floor. These cafés serve as a meeting place for various groups. Researchers are now able to reserve rooms on a short-term basis, allowing the space to be used in a more flexible way.
The concept also takes the multi-locationality of work into account; an office is just one place in which work is done. This means that work can be carried out using electronic communications and collaboration tools in the office itself, around the campus, in restaurants and cafés, when travelling, and at home. The project divided users of the Aalto ARTS premises into three groups on the basis of their mobility: i.e. ‘dedicated’, ‘campus mobile’, and ‘mobile’ users. These categories helped in the allocation of desks and workstations, with some users being assigned a workstation and others being more suited to shared workstations or hotdesks.
In planning the new office spaces, it is important to consider where the units will be located in order to ensure the promotion of interaction between different academic fields, incidental meetings, and spontaneous conversations.
‘The new Aalto ARTS office concept represents a courageous step for Finnish universities,’ says Aalto University's Working Environments Manager Päivi Hietanen.
‘In recent years, flexible and versatile spaces have become more common in the private and public sectors and this way of thinking has also started to enter the academic world. The Aalto ARTS concept supports the university's goal of being a pioneer in the field of new working and learning environments.’
The intention is that concept will be implemented in the school's new building complex and in other Aalto ARTS premises across the university's Otaniemi campus. According to ARTS Dean Anna Valtonen, the concept will be piloted in the dean's office. This pilot office will be set up on the Arabia campus during 2014 and the users' experiences will be utilised in the further development of the concept and the planning of the new building complex. The pilot office will be project managed by Esmi Santamäki and Antti Rouhunkoski will take responsibility for the interior design. Efforts will be made to involve the staff in the project.
The working environment project was commissioned by Aalto University Properties Ltd. and is part of RYM Ltd.'s Indoor Environments Program conducted with Tekes. Workspace Ltd. operated as a project consultant and the crowdsourcing survey was carried out by ThinkIf Ltd.
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