Hackable workspace

It’s a good idea to start any visit to Google’s new London HQ by taking the lift straight to the top floor. The building, on the pleasingly landscaped St Pancras Square, was supposed to be occupied by a bank. They had earmarked the top floor as the executive dining room, but so-called ‘Googlers’ eschew such hierarchy. The 11th floor now operates as an egalitarian café-cum-restaurant. At 11am one Friday in October, the place is buzzing with informal meetings, groups chatting, and people sitting with a laptop. There’s even activity on the vast sun-lit terrace, where a sole Googler performs a burst of press-ups.

These are the sights that make contemporary workplace designers’ hearts soar. These days, designers see their role as creating a variety of settings to cater for the different tasks, moods and personalities of staff. The sector jargon for this is ‘activity-based working’ or ‘agile working’, a phenomenon which was born out of a combination of the financial crisis and new technology. The 2008 economic crash made businesses reconsider their expensive office space.

Meanwhile, advances in technology have meant that people no longer need to be at their desk to be at work. The upshot has been less conventional banks of open-plan workstations – traditionally one per employee – and the introduction of break-out spaces, semi-enclosed pods, and short-term meeting areas bedecked with all manner of quirky seating from bar stools to bean bags. Patricia Brown, Chair of the London Festival of Architecture 2016, calls it “the whirlwind changes in the demand for new workplaces”.

Remake, reuse, relocate

On the lower floors of 6 St Pancras Square, a novel experiment is underway that could take these ‘whirlwind changes’ to another level. Google has installed a series of small rooms within the large floor plates. Instead of being permanent, these are flexible and hence temporary. Called ‘Jack’, they can be extended, repositioned or removed completely in a few days. Jack came out of a collaboration between Google and the building’s architecture firm, AHMM, whose founders are Bartlett School of Architecture alumni. “The idea was to have a meeting room that would be deliverable to a similar timeframe to the constantly evolving business processes and team structures,” says Ceri Davies, Associate Director at AHMM.

For fast-growing, fast-changing businesses like Google, an office configuration that is – figuratively or literally – set in stone, soon becomes obsolete. As subsidiaries and teams evolve, so too does the need for different sorts of spaces.

Dr Kerstin Sailer, Reader in Social and Spatial Networks at The Bartlett’s Space Syntax Lab, was commissioned by Google to write a whitepaper on the system and is now collaborating with the two firms to research the project’s impact. “The inflexibility of space has become particularly problematic in the 21st century business environment,” she says.

Davies echoes this: “For all the talk of flexibility, most fit-outs are actually very prescriptive. With Google’s real need for reconfiguring floor plates several times a year, Jack permits a dynamic fit-out that isn’t obsolete after the first day. In a wider context, the industry is notoriously wasteful when it comes to the ‘churn’ of tenants that might occupy speculative offices. Jack should help address that: if Google leaves 6 St Pancras Square, then Jack goes with them.”

Best of both worlds

Simon Allford, Director at AHMM, describes Jack as a sophisticated ‘seaside hut’ that is acoustically sealed, compliant with fire regulations, and taps into air conditioning if needs be. “Critical to its success is that it is made of a few key light and easily handled building components that can be endlessly reconfigured to make a single room, or a series of connected spaces, all of which can be linked to address different needs.”

In the first four months of Google’s occupancy of 6 Pancras Square, 93 Jacks were installed. AHMM gave staff two layout options: perpendicular or parallel, meaning they could be set out in a line running away from or alongside the atrium’s glass walls. So far, Googlers have opted for the latter, “creating a corridor between the Jacks and the glass of the atrium”, says Andrew Martin, Google’s Project Executive Lead for UKI & CE Real Estate & Workplace Services.

As a result, sightlines from one side of the building to the other have been obscured – not, perhaps, what the architects had intended. But maybe this is just what happens if employees are allowed to make these sorts of decisions. As Dr Sailer puts it: “Is it too much to ask lay people to structure their own space?”

Regardless of the layout choices, Davies is keen that Googlers take ownership of the Jacks. “We really want them to be appropriated by the personality of the different user groups,” she says. “Engineers, marketing and sales all have different needs and ways of working, and while Jack in its ‘raw’ state is a fully functional meeting room, they are intended over time to be ‘hacked’ and played around with. It would be great to be surprised by their future uses!”

So far, such hacking has included adding privacy to a couple of rooms, by putting screens over the glass walls and adding a lock, and extending two to make directors’ meeting rooms (or huddles, in Google-speak).

Dr Sailer became involved in this project after Google approached the Dean of the Bartlett, Alan Penn, on the hunt for an academic to write the whitepaper. The Dean forwarded their request to Dr Sailer, who remarks that “typically our work with commercial partners stems from contacts, networks and word of mouth.”

She is following up her academic analysis of Jack with research into how the rooms are used. This research, which focuses on the 9th and 10th floors, runs from October 2016 to March 2017 and is being funded by the EPSRC.

“This is a really nice research opportunity to look at what designers design, how users relate to that, and to ask whether what they have done is the ideal solution,” says Dr Sailer, pointing out that post-occupancy evaluation is rarely carried out because it’s so difficult to change anything. “My question is: do the users believe they will ever be changed? And how is it really hackable?”

She explains that the thoroughness of her research will depend on the kind of data that Google will release, beyond who sits where and who reserves Jacks. “I would like team performance data. For example, is there a difference between floors, between who is near the corridor or not?” She is keen to carry out a second phase of research with software simulations to test “if you place the Jacks differently, do you get a different social and spatial reality?”

In the meantime, Google’s Martin has another way of measuring Jack’s effectiveness: “If they allow people to work efficiently, they are a success,” he says. “They get more successful if they get recycled – if they have moved once in their lifetime, that’s a good cost story to tell.”

Meet Jack’s makers

AHMM started by researching proprietary systems, meaning off-the-shelf meeting room ‘pods’ and VC booths. But one of the key briefing criteria was to be free of a limited supply chain. “Google wanted to be able to erect and dismantle rooms quickly, without being beholden to long lead-in times or cost premiums,” says AHMM's Ceri Davies. “So pretty early on we knew a bespoke route would be required.”

Google also wanted a system that could be rolled out across its global estate, so AHMM opted for the universal material plywood. The architects created a template that could be CNC-cut in any joinery workshop across the world.

Jack's base module is a frame to which a front and back panel can be fitted to form cassettes. While the width (600mm) and depth (150mm) of all cassettes is constant, the heights vary to facilitate a wide range of uses.

As well as being linked back-to-back, cassettes can be linked to each other vertically and horizontally. The basic Jack module comprises two room scenarios: a two-to-three-person VC booth and four-to-six-person small meeting room, but iterations of the cassettes are also used for screens and print areas.

AHMM hopes that the cassettes will be adopted for different functions in the future. AHMM built a series of prototypes to test different criteria, and to perfect the connection system so that a room can be erected by a trained facilities management team in a day, with lighting and air-conditioning connections taking longer to set-up. “Given the individual cassettes, or a room in its entirety, need to be reused two or three times to justify its capital costs, then ease of assemble and disassemble was vitally important,” says Davies.

To minimise noise issues, AHMM worked with Sandy Brown Acoustics and tested many prototypes to ensure the joint connection in corners – at the floor and the door – were not the weak spots. “Reverberation in the room was also a key criteria, with Google doing much of their work via video conferencing,” says Davies.

She explains that AHMM doesn’t ‘own’ Jack. “As is standard for any of our projects, we retain copyright of our designs but grant our clients a license to use them for the specific purposes of the project for which they have been designed.” In this case, that includes the reuse of Jack in other Google offices.

Read the Research

• Whitepaper: Project Jack - Google's answer to the problem of flexible spaces (K. Sailer, 2016)
• Book chapter: Organizational Learning and Physical Space: How Office Configurations Inform Organizational Behaviors (K. Sailer, 2014)
• Proceedings paper: Spatiality and transpatiality in workplace environments (K. Sailer, 2009) 

Infographic

Download 'Critical Mass', our Annual Review data breakdown

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The Bartlett Review 2016