A small village design to change the ways of working of a company from an island of lonely workers towards a network community. The PULS headquarters in Munich by Evolution Design is a workplace thought to foster and support the needs brought by a flexible and digital workstyle, introducing a social platform inspired by the concept of neighborhoods.
When PULS, a medium-size business company, specialized in creating high-quality DIN rail power supplies, had to move their headquarters in Munich (Germany), they decide to take the opportunity of changing their organizational culture towards the modernization and digitalization of their workspace.
Therefore, the HR department along with Evolution Design has decided to think about the office as a social collaboration platform that could allow a more agile and transparent knowledge sharing.
The idea was to move the company culture from an archipelago of islands of lonely workers to a village (3.300 sqm), a network community, capable of bringing together different teams.
From this idea, Evolution Design has created distinct neighborhoods where different teams are located, with individual colors and a bold graphic concept made to demarcate the space, foresting cross-pollination among engineering, manufacturing, IT, marketing, senior manager and HR.
These new approach results to be really effective with teams reporting a significant increase in internal communication, while spontaneous informal meeting keeps on happening more and more frequently.
Another key feature of the project was the involvement of the staff that leads to sometimes change the design ideas based on the workers’ feedback. An example is the adoption of the assigned individual desk model instead a hot-desking system, but, on the other side, reducing the overall area devoted to individual workplaces, delivering more floor space for communal areas and collaborative activities, designing also lounges, a cafè, coffee points, meeting pods, creative rooms and a large central amphitheatre.
Text by Gabriele Masi.
Pictures by Peter Wuermli.
