An idea was slowly forming in my head, a concept for a workplace that moved with you, one that encouraged you to go for a walk every so often, to unlock your divergent thinking and come at your work with a fresh perspective.

The next stage of development saw me taking the sketches I had been working on and turning them into 3D versions. I played about with repeating elements and blocking some of the shapes out while others were just frames. The designs I preferred out of all of them are the ones with three frames on the underside of the table as I feel the repetition of the shape works well and would most likely strengthen the structure. My thoughts at this point in the process were that this structure would be the height of a standing desk so that it could be used on the go but also be used while seated. I figured this could also be used as a standalone piece of furniture, allowing it to be used in a wider variety of situations such as working from home or in smaller spaces that don’t have enough room to house both elements of the design. I used this method of experimentation to also play about with how the station might stand up considering the weight of the table would not be central over the wheel. I was also starting to realise the practicalities of taking this for a walk while trying to do work at the same time and decided to explore alternative ways of logging power for the light.

Perhaps there could be an accompanying app that tracked your step count that allowed you to unlock time in the pod in return for hitting milestones in the day.

The next step was to start modelling in sketch-up to get a feel for how the design could work in terms of scale compared to people and also how they could fit inside a pod-like space as a place to settle down and work convergently. With next to no model making materials at home this was my best tool to really develop the design and play about with forms for this pod space. At first I tried taking the arched shapes from the work station designs and played about with creating a space out of them at a bigger scale, however I felt it didn’t create the welcoming, enclosed hub space that I had envisioned. Instead I took this arched shape and played about with creating the floor plan of the pod with it instead and was much happier with the results. At the same time I was deliberating over the finer details of the work station, deciding between more rounded supporting stuctures or more angular ones. In the end I decided I prefered the softer look of the tubular arch shapes that would make up the frame of the station. Next I had to decide on a height for the table part of the design, would it be standard desk height or would it be more like a standing desk? I preferred the extended height more as I felt it lent itself to more flexibility when working. Therefore this also allowed me to scale up the wheels to add this height in order to maintain balance between the scale of the legs and of the poles on which the lights would be added. This visual language of arched shapes and rounded edges created a sense of balance and simplicity to the design that I appreciated for its softer appearance and the more peaceful connotations it would bring to the workspace.

I then conducted a survey to get the opinions of my peers and others. that use the spaces I had been documenting through photography.

WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN YOU REALLY NEED TO GET SOMETHING DONE? You almost never hear someone reply ‘the office’ to this. You tend to get one of three types of answer : a location, a moving object or a time. People are pulled in a million different directions during their day in the office, trading in their working day for a series of working moments snatched in between meetings, quick questions and small favours asked of them by their colleagues. Working from home may lead to distractions, but most of these are voluntary, you choose whether to be distracted by the tv or when to go for a walk. At work all you have is involuntary distractions that you don’t have any control over. When I asked people in my survey this question, lots of the responses reflected that they felt most productive in a space that they’ve chosen, not necessarily in their dedicated work spaces. The consensus seemed to be that their homes weren’t their ideal workplace because most people either didn’t have room to dedicate to an office or they hadn’t thought it a priority to do so until times changed and they found themselves working from home and in lockdown in an effort to slow down the spread of the Coronavirus. Looking into tips for working from home, the advice seemed to be based around creating routines and scheduling breaks or movement around the house during the working day to mix up your surroundings. This seemed to go along with the aims of my project at its current stage of development. All I had to do was adapt what I had already designed to be implemented in the home. Bearing in mind every person’s home is different and the space they will have to allocate to a workspace will differ I wanted to adapt what I had already designed to become a ‘kit of parts’ that could be tweaked to suit.

In response to my survey and more specifically the question of “Where do you go when you need to get something done?”, the majority of the answers did not say either the workplace or the home. Instead, the respondants seemed to prefer places they could choose to work, around other people but not necessarily people they knew. These answers helped to inform the places that I wanted my design to be able to be implemented and above are the final seven that I settled on. Some of them overlap, as denoted by the arrows between them. And so now it was time to develop the final design.