Design for achieving strategic business objectives

Abstract

The workplace is simultaneously functioning as a site of personal productivity and social interaction. As such, the contemporary work environment demands a multiple functioning architectural space, for which our current understandings of process, program and even building type are insufficient. As organizations become increasingly complex and their competitive environments less stable, progressively higher demands are placed on work environments. In an attempt to reframe some of our current workplace design challenges, this thesis looks to neighboring fields of research: organizational management, urban design and planning and the field of environmental psychology. This work looks to discover a more empirical understanding of success and failures in office design approaches, new modes of investigation, and new approaches to communication within an architectural intervention. Some of these hybrid components will then be deployed for making recommendations on the reconfiguration of an office of fifty educational consultants located in Boston, MA. This sample implementation is then used to evaluate the relative usefulness of tools for different purposes within the analysis and design process.