Transforming flexible working through modular work booths
Okamura, Japan’s foremost office furniture maker, joined our design leadership training programme called Design Immersion in 2019, with one of their designers relocating to London to co-work with us. Over three months, we strove to create solutions to a growing need for flexible working arrangements within a workplace.
Services
- Design Leadership Training
- Co-creation
- Product & Service Innovation
- Design Strategy
- Product Design
Learning
Design Immersion is a collaborative innovation and design training programme that is hosted at our London studio. Running over periods from three months to one year, programmes help develop client team capabilities at the same time as co-creating design solutions to diverse business problems.
Immersed in the culture of our studio and guided by our team to find rich and diverse sources of inspiration, collaboratively explored the mercurial nature of work. The question we then asked ourselves was, “If job demands are ever-changing, and office space is expensive, why is office furniture so static?”
Leaping
Our research highlighted that for different tasks and situations people required flexibility throughout the day. We identified the need to create furniture to support a range of work scenarios.
The potential for a workspace that could provide both private spaces for introspection as well as larger more social and collaborative environments to interact with colleagues was identified.
Landing
The furniture needed to be easy to adapt, so we focused on sourcing superlight materials to make reconfiguration easy without tools.
‘Co-comori’, the modular work booth that can be reconfigured in minutes. The angle of its signature wall provides a welcoming entrance on one side and offers greater privacy on the other. When multiple booths are configured together, the angled walls create different distinctive forms depending on the arrangement.
Our collaborative co-working process has helped Okamura to create an inventive solution to flexible working, which has won critical acclaim and a Red Dot Award 2021.
The training program 'Design Immersion' provided by tangerine for Japanese companies fits well with Okamura's strategy to design for local cultures.
Shoichi Izawa, Designer at Okamura
