In today’s digital landscape, every business is a producer of media, whether it’s content for social media channels or internal video for corporate communications. How a company interprets and communicates media will ultimately help determine the efficacy of their brand.
Businesses no longer have the luxury of embracing traditional channels of communication. Gone are the days of a brand reaching consumers solely through print advertisements, billboards, or word of mouth.
In 2018, brands are beginning to see potential in an integrated multi-channel approach, borrowed in many cases from longstanding traditions found in the broadcast industry.
These messaging techniques have far-reaching effects, with notable trends increasingly seen throughout workplace design.
High-performing zoned spaces are better than open plans
Open floor plans may seem appealing and hip to millennials, but they decrease productivity and lead to a loss of environmental satisfaction among employees.
A recent study by Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban finds that open-plan offices actually causes a decrease in office interaction among co-workers.
“Rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM,” the researchers note in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Open plans may seem preferable for their democratic use of space, but introducing a hierarchy of public, private, and interstitial spaces – each holding specific relationships to each other in lieu of organizational chaos – allows work and collaboration to be more focused and yields programmatic efficiencies in the long run.
This “zoning” concept is a fundamental tenet of broadcast design, helping to elevate the space by giving a specific purpose to each piece of a studio environment. These individualized spaces adopt strategies commonly found in broadcast to help delineate zones.
Bumble’s Headquarters
For example, in the Bumble headquarters by Mark Odom Studio, unique lighting strategies and material cues (such as the use of repeating patterns and the consideration of acoustics) are employed to help create distinct spaces for collaboration and focused work.
Bumble also plays with variations in scale to create a larger-than-life beehive aesthetic that gets a little funky while remaining inviting for workers and visitors.
The thoroughly branded workplace as the product itself
Due to the nature of broadcast media, studio environments have always, by sheer necessity, been thoroughly branded spaces, integrating logos and show titles along with distinct color palettes and graphics.
Likewise, interior design has always been a component of corporate branding. However, with the rise of competitive co-working spaces, we are seeing companies differentiate themselves by branding their spaces in new and unconventional ways that extend beyond the traditional “interior design” banner.
Signage, amenities, and finishes are no longer just boxes to check off; they are opportunities to differentiate your brand from a competitor.
The goal of modern interior design is now to create a space where people want to work that is instantly recognizable as your brand’s facility, just as it has always been in the world of broadcast.