The workplace as a tool

Stream : Can you tell us more about the activities and values of YNNO?

Jan-Peter Kastelein : YNNO started around 10 years ago with a vision of creating a consultancy firm that could integrate the bits, the bricks, and the brains into one proposition for clients; bits meaning we advise our clients on modernizing information and communication technology systems (ICTs ), bricks as how we carefully tailor and construct the building, to the brains on installing and advising for innovative HR  practice. Most important is ensuring thorough integration of all three; not just HR, not just the building, and not just IT, but a whole systems approach for our clients. We care about the “ecology of the workplace,” as it is referred to here at YNNO. What we do is advise our clients on how to best optimize and balance this ecology.

Stream :  Who are the people working for YNNO?

Jan-Peter Kastelein :YNNO is very diverse. We have people working for us with backgrounds in architecture, design, ICT, even in social science (sociologists, occupational psychologists, clinical psychologists). Additionally we hire people with background in the same field as our clients, especially healthcare and business.

As a consultancy firm we aim to innovate; we can only do so if we have people among our team familiar with existing business models. Further, when we send someone knowledgeable in this regard, this helps build trust with the client and facilitates our process. Work is at the core of whatever we do. Our personnel has been trained to first understand the client and then translate understanding into designs that help the client work more efficiently and effectively.

Evidence-based design

Stream : How do you organize your practice? Do you rely on precedents and standard procedures or do you have to start fresh with each client?

Jan-Peter Kastelein : Learning and knowledge sharing is very important. We are a four partner firm, myself as one of them, who have joined together specifically with this aim in mind. We encourage personnel to form discussion groups based on topical subjects. For example, one group focuses on evidence-based design and on how to integrate that into consulting with clients. Projects are the fruit of internal collaboration and exchange of knowledge and ideas. The office for us is really a space for sharing, interacting, and learning so that when we are away with clients we can produce better solutions.

Stream : You have mentioned evidence-based design as an important part of the practice of your office. How exactly does evidence-based design work?

Jan-Peter Kastelein : Evidence-based design stems from healthcare practices and procedure. A physician is trained to take notes on everything, using these records to develop their practice. The first architects to adopt evidence-based design, about ten years ago, were involved with designing for medical and health facilities. Inspired by the pragmatism of healthcare, they sought a way to design safer, healthier, and more comfortable medical facilities. So what is evidence-based design? My definition is simple: using credible research to inform design decisions, credible here meaning research held up to rigorous academic standards. One of my biggest critiques of other practices and of our own practice, is that we are not yet accustomed to using research in design. Work we do mostly stems from creativity, intuition, prior experience, and building standards. There is a big gap between the research community, the design community, and on-the-field. In fact, we get most of the pressure to incorporate evidence-based design into our practice from the clients themselves.

Stream : How is evidence-based design used in your relation with a client? What can be gained by adopting this practice?

Fostering serendipity

Stream : For the knowledge economy, creativity and innovation are the two lovers for competitivity. Meanwhile the rapid growth of communication technologies, equally pertinent, has a tendency to make the physical office disappear. What sort of “office” do you envision could encompass the technology and trends of the knowledge economy while also facilitating encounters, sharing, and innovation?

Jan-Peter Kastelein : Stemming from my research and my own personal experience, one of the four most important factors for sharing and collaboration to happen, is awareness. Why awareness? If you are aware of a fellow employee’s work it is much easier to start a conversation like “Hey, what are you doing? Tell me about your work. Tell me about how I can help you or how you can help me.” If this sort of awareness of each other’s unique background, experience, or style is not happening, it is very hard for collaboration to happen. You can create workplace environments to facilitate this awareness. For example, many people refer to me as a “white board maniac” because I have been installing wall-wide white boards in all of the projects. A big wall-sized white board can be a useful tool to facilitate discussions, especially if you leave the drawings and notes up; it is about leaving traces of your thought processes. One of the major problems of offices today is this compulsive need for a “clean office,” these “leave a clean desk behind policies,” erasing all of these notes and generative ideas. The “flexible office” has generated a culture of packing up and erasure. These sorts of spaces are the dullest office environments in the world; they lack identity. For example, Nokia HQ in Helsinki, is a beautifully designed building; but if I walk in there, I wouldn’t be able to tell what sort of work they do: it could be an insurance company, a bank, a hospital, it could be anything. Again, there is no identity to that building whatsoever because no one leaves anything behind. How will anybody learn from each other if they cannot figure out what each other is doing? This awareness is very important.

The next important aspect is access. Knowing what each other is up to doesn’t do much good if you do not have the access to continue developing ideas and interact. Putting people in boxes is a very bad idea. A closed door acts as a sort of psychological boundary that creates a segregation of public and private domain discouraging each other from interacting. In American office complex buildings with big open spaces full of cubicles, it’s very difficult to know where people are. They literally don’t have access to each other. We can create offices that are more open, that put a big emphasis on “way finding.”

And then it all leads on to the third factor, engagement. If there is no energy, time, or privacy to engage in these discussions, they are never going to happen. Yes it’s great, I’m aware of what you are doing, I had access so I was able to find you, but now we need to find a place, out of our primary work station, as to not disturb others, to engage. This could mean providing a mix of workspaces, where people can meet formally, informally, in teams on projects, facilitated with good technology, good design, good food and coffee, whatever they may need. Google has technical assistance support centers merged with a secondary program of informal restaurant. So while waiting for tech support, you can have a coffee and interact with people from all over the building, spawning creative fusion between minds from, for example, the mobile department and the online department leading to who knows what sort of technical innovations.

Lastly there is trust, important to all factors. How do you create an environment where people can feel safe enough to trust and where they feel trusted? If people feel valued, its much more likely that people are going to trust each other as well. So what we can do is first of all design environments on a human scale, which do feel great, and which express the full value of trust. I don’t have the full answer but I can sense it. Walking around the Google office or at Nike, one can sense this feeling immediately. It’s not something that can be written on the wall, but it is somehow openness in design and procedure that effaces transparency, that the organization is worthy of its employees trust. It’s pride, transparency, awareness of what everyone is doing.

Stream : Can you talk about the Creative Valley project in Utrecht? This morning you said that this project could not have come about with just a random promoter or real estate developer.

Jan-Peter Kastelein : I won’t say that it would have been impossible, but assembling the right team was key to the success of the project. We wanted to come up with an example to show the world what a model multi-tenant office would look like with sharing as the core value, employee comfort the chief goal. We wanted to make a place that, even in an undesirable location, far from the city, not even easily accessible, is still a very desirable place to work. A place where people want to be. And people really do want to be here. We have built an ecosystem out of a building and that didn’t happen from day one. And we had a shared vision amongst the developer, ourselves, and the architect to help make this project work. In the end, as well,it really depends on having the right tenants. A vision is no good without someone willing to fund it. Finance and economy are very important factors in addition to behavior within the building.

And we know it has worked. I always tell my employees, if you can get the client over here that’s at least 50% of the work done right there. This building really exemplifies what our mission is and demonstrates what we can do for our clients. People can see it and experience it. Whatever room you use, the ambiance is a little bit different. Spontaneous conversations occur in the hallways. This maybe is not the solution but it is a solution that proves that our ideas can work and can be used to even regenerate old offices. I used to say that many of the old offices complexes in Holland, built unsustainably and hard to get to, were destined to be turned back into cow pastures, that that would be the best thing to do with them. But now, I have begun to see a future for such complexes. There have been successful renovations, and there are some very positive spaces. Though I’m still not fully optimistic, there may yet be a future for the poorly designed office complexes of the past.

Multiple tenants environnement

Stream : Can you define how this building is different from the traditional office building?

Jan-Peter Kastelein : How did you feel when you first entered the building?

Stream : Well it doesn’t look like an office building. We know a lot of the rules and that this building doesn’t follow a lot of them, which makes it in our eyes more beautiful and more comfortable of a space.

Jan-Peter Kastelein : One caveat to this space is that it is twice the price of a standard office. The only reason you would make that sort of monetary commitment is if you really see the value in a space like this to overall performance of your organization. You can rent an office in certain areas at warehouse prices, so about 90€ a square meter. This is roughly 360€. People want to be here despite the price because of the experimental environment and because of the positive performance results. It is one of the most commercially viable around here. We have a waiting list. We never would have dreamed that it would be as successful as it has become. Companies are looking to differentiate, to attract better personnel, even to be able to market themselves as a forward thinking company. My message to property developers is not necessarily to copy this complex, but to investigate the ideas behind it; to not fall back upon the tired office complex formulas, where no one wants to be—inhumane even—but to try to create a new sort of environment.

Stream : This is a very important subject and with quite a bit of intelligence on the matter, though dispersed, it starts to resemble a strong trend. We would like to know more about the collaboration process with the architect. And second, how do you see this concept and the new office environment in the rest of the world? Is it a niche, creative-firm trend not appropriate for banks and lawyers? If so, could it become in 20 years universally appropriate?

Jan-Peter Kastelein : There is always tension between the vision of the architect and us, the workplace strategists. The architect typically does not want anything interfering with their ability to create a beautiful building. We value this of course, but our goal is to create a building that works for the client by incorporating design with management strategies. With some architecture firms, our process works great, and with others we find this very difficult to implement. In those cases, the firms are so strong in their design vision, that they are not even open to their client’s needs. We often end up in the position as the voice of the client, for example, when used to do the architect selection. And with the architect, we first invest a lot of time gaining understanding of each other’s working style and vision, which really pays off in the results achieved. Yes, we don’t always agree, but it is about mutual respect. The architect can approach us and say, “You are the workplace strategists, help us figure out what the client’s needs really are and help us to reflect on the design options we come up with.” We are really there to be the ones asking the tough questions, to inquire, “Why are the walls red?” At the core, that is how the relationship between an agency like ours, and the architect, looks like. It’s not always an easy position to be in because we are always learning as well about what designs do work and what don’t. We really mean to convey to the designer that we too dream design and that we are really on the same page. With the developer, we must really sell the vision, even if it is relatively untested. We were not sure if the Creative Valley was going to be a success or a complete failure, but because of a common dream, we were able to make it happen. It took investment, learning, and building relationships amongst ourselves, before we were able to get this complex to the point that it is today.

Stream : But in this case, you were not working for a specific client; you were just working for yourselves right?