Gfk – Milan Offices
Il Prisma has developed a new office in Milan for global market research company Gfk based on the concepts of Smart Working.
Abandoning the traditional workplace design concept to long for working wherever and however anyone wants.
It’s called ‘Smart Working’, and this awareness of the new role of the office, not as a space of control and control, but a landmark to foster relationships and sharing experiences, that represented the beginning of the collaboration between the GfK and Il Prisma.
The GfK Group provides information on markets and consumers, to support the decision making of customers. More than 13,000 experts of market research joining professional passion for over 80 years of experience in the Group’s research methods, treatment and processing of data. This allows GfK to provide strategic analysis and in-depth global necessary, supplemented by knowledge of the local market of more than 100 countries.
For GfK, Il Prisma has put together a dedicated team and a scientific methodology, called Redefine your Habits, which can be defined as process of “designing with”, rather than “designing for”.
An even more challenging task, in this case, for both Il Prisma and GfK: confronting with experts of research who aim defining nowadays trends and needs, it has inevitably spread new ideas and possibilities.
This way was given birth, even earlier than a client-designer relationship, a close alliance between Il Prisma and GfK in the belief that today is essential to move forward together, in the definition of needs at the base of a ‘comfortable’ and ‘peaceful’ way of working.
While, therefore, the needs of professionals and companies change, new technologies enable people to work wherever and however they want, getting rid of the traditional office. Thus it is ‘smart’ not having a single work station and it is ‘smart’ being able to work where and how anybody wants, provided the achievements of goals, cost containment and environmental conciousness.
No longer, therefore, standard environments mainly focused on the functional aspects, but customized spaces, which can actually accommodate the corporate organizational dynamics. In addition, the work-life balance, the subjective dimension, relational and psychological worker are important factors that must be taken into account in the projects.
Il Prisma has been working for months with the employees of the GfK Group, realizing real workshop on the assumption that the GfK Group is represented with a physical product and standardized. The value is in the people and in research work they do every day.
The involvement by GfK was large to such an extent that the company has thought to internally manage the quantitative analysis later.
At the end of the investigation statistics and comparisons with employees, it emerged mainly 5 issues and therefore needs to be translated into strong ‘Smart Working’:
- The need to take advantage of moments of concentration – a complex formula to decline in open space.
- The need for spaces where they can meet to collaborate with colleagues and managers, however, not only at meetings but also meetings planned and spontaneous brainstorming.
- The frequent use of the phone from some team.
- Live a moment of socialization linked more to break work.
- To handle with care, but also customization, its location and personal storage.
From the need to combine these needs harmoniously uniting the ‘DNA’ of the Company, Il Prisma outlined a metaphor of the project, evoking the passage of the raw material to the state power.
It born from the need to translate the two souls of GfK: a rigorous and mathematical, representative of statistical research; the other fluid, linked to creative twist, the activity of psychological research qualitative.
The open space is fragmented and divided by a series of environments to support both the informal meeting and the meetings planned and formal.
It is, therefore, supported by both the study activity that is more relational, more noisy. In the first case the operating areas are broken up by a series of rooms where you can find the concentration or be able to do the meetings without disturbing those who work at their desk.
The workstations are equipped with dividers to offer more variety between the different moments of privacy and storage. They are also interspersed with informal seating. In the second case we have created the “chat box” and the “buzz room”.
These environments closable seeds that allow an increasing level of separation from the rest of the stations and usable spontaneously for the moments of comparison in small groups. The desk is not the only support to work.
There is no longer a clear division between the workplace, corridors and break areas, but a continuous space where activities are followed in sequence, generating a landscape of different materials and colors.
Design: Il Prisma
Photography: Courtesy of Il Prisma
