IBM Studios Austin

IBM Studios Austin is our flagship space and home to more than 350 full-time designers. It’s 50,000 square feet designed expressly to bring the best out of IBM Designers: a dynamic space of reconfigurable furniture and work areas.

The 7th floor is a first-of-a-kind fluid workspace made of removable whiteboards on sliding rails. The walls move. That isn’t a metaphor.

And near the entrance hangs a neon sign that reads empathy, not ego. The rest of the studio exists to make that sentence physically true.

In a company known for cubicles and fluorescent lighting, how do you build a home for practicing design with intent?

Inviting, modern workspaces for our incoming designers aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re expected. But the IBM RESO playbook was set back in the ’80s and hadn’t been updated. New builds were meant to follow the cubicle layout, and that simply wasn’t an option for the hundreds of designers being hired.

A cubicle isn’t a neutral object. It’s a decision about how work happens, repeated a few thousand times. The environment we inherited taught people to sit still, stay separate, and wait for the meeting. We were hiring people to do none of those things.

The hypothesis: an infinitely reconfigurable environment would cultivate creativity, curiosity, and empathy.

As the second iteration of IBM Design got underway, about 75 of us were stuffed into a narrow, temporary space. While I was designing the official new studio, I noticed the young designers disassembling the heavy boardroom furniture and reconfiguring their workspaces around whatever problem they were solving at the time.

That is design thinking, applied to drywall. Observe what people actually do. Take it seriously, especially when it isn’t what the plan says. Then make it easier to do.

I took it as a design cue. All the furniture in the studio would be on wheels, and if it couldn’t have wheels, it had to be movable by no more than two people who were five feet tall and ninety pounds. Nobody would ever need to ask facilities, or anyone else, for a different room.

If our circulation is open and free, it provides every designer more and better opportunities to take quick, exploratory laps around a problem to arrive at the best solutions for our users.

I designed the studio around behaviors instead of seating charts. Every piece of it, the furniture, the walls, the graphics, the lighting, had to make a way of working easier, or it didn’t go in.

Fluid spaces

Working with Steelcase, I introduced a first-of-a-kind rail system that allows for rapid construction and destruction of workspaces. Whiteboards fitted with a mechanism we dubbed “the taco” slide into a three-track rail, making sliding walls that can be opened, closed, added, or removed, so the workspace flows with whatever the people in it are doing.

Naming a piece of hardware the taco isn’t serious. That was the point. What it enabled was: the room stopped being a fact and became a variable.

Living & livable spaces

As IBMers, we spend much of our time working. One evening I was at home with my feet up on the coffee table, laptop open, TV on, getting more done than I did at most desks. The idea struck to design the rest of the 7th floor after the spaces in a home.

So there are spaces that emulate the kitchen island, the most used surface in any home, perfect for informal gatherings and work that needs a larger surface. The living room areas are lit with incandescent lamps and furnished with couches and coffee tables, for informal meetings or jamming with headphones on. There are three large dining room tables for spreading work out, the way we all do at home, and a kitchen with a laid-back coffee-shop vibe so working and socializing can happen in one place.

People think differently in rooms that feel human. The least a workplace can do is act like it knows that.

The 8th floor makes the case for where design at IBM comes from. The graphics connect the studio to our design legacy: the old machines blown up to wall scale, THINK spelled out above a pair of Eames lounge chairs, the eye-bee-M. A Charles Eames line greets you from the wall. The details are not the details. They make the design.

The 7th floor makes the case for where it goes next. The fluid spaces are home to our Education+Activation offerings and countless internal and external IBM Design Thinking workshops: rooms built in the morning, worked hard all day, and gone by evening.

IBM Studios Austin became the flagship of IBM Design. The fluid spaces drew visits from Google, Apple, and others interested in bringing the system to their own work environments. A company famous for its campuses came to look at our furniture. I enjoyed that.

What changed

The RESO playbook said new space follows the cubicle layout. The studio replaced that with a different rule: space follows behavior. The room itself taught people how this part of the company intended to work, before anyone said a word.

More than 350 designers called it home. The walls moved every day.

What still matters

Most of what I learned building the studio wasn’t about architecture. It was about permission. People already know how they need to work. They’ll tell you, usually by moving the furniture, if the furniture can move.

Companies still argue about what a workplace is for. The studio answered a version of that question early: a workplace earns the commute when the room does something your kitchen table can’t. Ours let people think together at wall scale, then break back into teams by lunch.

And the wheels rule holds anywhere. Every environment you design, physical or digital, teaches people what they’re allowed to do in it. Design the permission first. The furniture follows.