WORK ORANGE

Orange

One thing is immediately noticeable: a bright orange as the leading colour of this working environment. It comes from the logo of the client, engaged &Company, and is spread throughout the room: it can be found milled into the desks, as lettering on the walls, on the writing and magnetic boards and in the lights and furniture. The design office raumkontor Innenarchitektur contrasted it in a lively interplay with white perforated sheets, from which much of the furniture was built, whereby this identification motif was also continued in the interior design and in the form of an abstract wall graphic. The interior of the elongated floor of an existing building in Essen, which the IT recruitment consultancy chose as its location and where 50 employees now work on a total area of 568 square metres, also has a further meta-level: the activating and playful world of sport is symbolically incorporated through sports quotes on the walls and tables as well as the actual opportunity for a table tennis match or the use of a Porsche Design pool table. Intuitively, this strengthens flexibility in terms of content and active skills.

my place

The same applies to the desire for team building or cooperation with one another, which is deliberately encouraged by the variously designed facilities for agile cooperation spread across the space. One half of the floor plan is dedicated to flexible communication – soft lounge-style seating, spatially separated meeting tables or opportunities for informal get-togethers at the bar or in the bistro. The other half of the space, with its four and six-person desks, concentrates on focused work. engaged &Company attaches great importance to a working environment that caters to young and innovative employees, opens up and professionalises options, but is also a “great good place”. The structural concept “my place*” by raumkontor was a comprehensive response to this, right down to the proverbial “red thread”, which hangs cool as a strip of light above the long break table – but even that is actually orange.

What do you think are the key qualities of a good workplace?
Jens Wendland: Workplaces are places of fulfilment. The more I identify with a place, the more comfortable and relaxed I feel – and the more I can contribute to joint projects with vigour, my personality and my qualities. For this to work, creative independence is just as important as varied and dynamic work scenarios and diverse communication locations in a workspace.
Do you see any similarities in interior design for living and working?
Today, different areas of life are no longer separate blocks, but a lively melange with diverse overlaps and intersections. This also means for the design worlds that aspects of the private and the communal merge into a new whole. “Living” is no longer just cosy and well-behaved, but also bold and expressive. And “working” is no longer just a neutral, everyday place, but highly individualised.
Which functional aspects do you consider to be the most important in the future development of workspaces?
In the development from cellular offices to freely structured workspaces, a convention that had previously been perceived as mandatory was questioned – that of the walls between workstations. What could be the next big challenge? It would be worth taking an unconventional new look at the workplace itself. Working without the desk in its standardised size and traditional arrangement – why not? Perhaps a lighthouse project is needed as a game changer.