From the well-funded and delicately mapped out walls of any WeWork location to the bean bags and rustic floors of your local coworking space, designing a flexible workspace from scratch takes a bit of trial and error before reaching the point of being a fine-tuned craft.
AllWork caught up with Don Ball, co-founder of COCO, to take a deeper dive into what it really takes to design a flexible workspace.
We turned back the clock and asked Don what his initial vision was in terms of designing the very first COCO location.
DB: That was 7 years ago, so you have to remember that at the time coworking was more of a movement than an industry. Our vision was to create a place where innovative, collaborative people would choose to show up. It was that simple. As bootstrappers, we had to take our initial space as-is. So mostly, we found ourselves compensating for the idiosyncrasies of the space.
…that said, we knew a couple things for sure:
One, that the space needed a social focus. So, we took the front of the space, which had big picture windows and the previous tenant’s kitchen, and used that space to set the tone we wanted to convey. The combination of light, food, coffee and music made this an attractive space for people to experience coworking for the first time.
Two, we felt it was important to keep things open. Ideally, we would have had one huge open space. But we were stuck with a bunch of wing-walls that had been left in place by the previous tenant. We couldn’t afford to ‘tear down’ the walls and re-run the electrical, so we had to turn them into something that would work for us.
That was the birth of what we call “campsites” – our semi-private group workspaces with only 3 walls. We told people, “You can’t have a 4th wall and door, because that would stop collaboration.” In a sense, we were just making that up, but it turned out to be true. Today, our group spaces are split evenly between campsites and suites. Suites are popular – and in our view necessary – but given the choice, some members still prefer the openness and energy that you can only get from a campsite.