Julia Goldberg / Illustration by Carla Fuentes
Technology is core to our culture and key for our infrastructure. When it comes to the technology experience within a space, I am a true believer, but I am also a true believer that technology has a place. When it starts trying to replace empathy and human interaction, we start losing ourselves as a community. Technology can enhance the experience or shorten the trip or help with wayfinding or tell me where my meeting is and how to get a coffee delivered. It can help communicate with clients. It can help make someone’s job easier. But it shouldn’t take away the human element.
BuzzFeed's New York City office / Courtesy Taylor Miller
One of the aspects of my role is to come up with new, interesting, and responsible levers to protect our financial investment in real estate. I’m not the architect, and I’m not necessarily the end user. I’m the workplace advocate for my clients (all employees, our guests, our external clients), equipped with a designer’s mindset, even though I’m not a “true” designer. Early on in my career, I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could about general construction, workplace design, and workplace strategy. My differentiating factor from those in similar roles is my background in technology (I came up the IT track) combined with a background in finance (I worked in private equity/mergers and acquisitions), so I understand the costs of things and how to look at ROI. At the end of the day, facilities and office services are ultimately responsible to finance.
What that really means is that when I’m looking at a new location, I’m looking at multiple levers: Should we go coworking first? What’s the most basic build I can do that I can build onto later? I’m asking: Are we building modular spaces that allow for additional infrastructure, culture, and amenities, and what is the cost of those things in both tangible and cultural terms? We need to be able to build multiples of something—can we do that in this space? We need to come up with a kit of parts to streamline the process, so what is the furniture? What is the AV spec? Who gets a sit-stand desk?
This article is part of the “tech x interiors” special section that was guest-edited by the design firm Studio O+A. The section, which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Metropolis Magazine, explores how technology is reshaping the workplace.
