Professor Abigail Knopf
Throughout this large-scale planning studio sponsored by VOCON, students developed an interior environment for PIGMENT, a 2,000-employee paint and coatings manufacturer located on the coast of Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio. Each of the 4 studio sections were provided a different 32,000 s.f. floor and program supporting a variety of departments and business functions within the 10-story building. PIGMENT asked students to focus on “Reinventing the Workplace” with a dynamic vision of hybrid solutions for remote and in-office functions conceptualized around the motto plan for your work, work for your day. While assessing the office of the future, strong considerations were made for embracing how Generation Z prefers to work, collaborate and innovate. PIGMENT tasked the design team of students with planning for a commitment to diverse work styles, insuring space for quality personal interactions and immersive collaboration. This 3rd year interior design studio maintained a heavy emphasis on teamwork. While students worked individually on construction documents, creative options for the designed space remained a team effort between groups of 2-3 students and teams cross collaborated with other students between floors/studios to develop dynamic solutions.
Kylissa Himes & Olivia Rufe
Pigment - GenZ and Beyond
The goal for this project is to emphasize what the building can do for its users by implementing WELL design. This was a driving component for the design concept by thinking about the brain as focus spaces, the heart as collaboration, the lungs as wellness, and the skin as senses. These office designs feature pops of color, flexible environments, and a homelike atmosphere. A few other GenZ components that were considered are diverse modes of sharing within the space including advanced technology and a featured pet zone for employees.
Clarissa Plassman & Alexa Pasadyn
Pigment Headquarters
Pigment is a paint and coatings manufacturer, located in Cleveland, OH. Post-pandemic, corporations like Pigment are opting for a hybrid workplace, with Gen-Z and beyond in mind. Collaboration and teamwork is crucial for company success. The flexibility of the workplace suggests higher productivity. Pigment aims to reinvent the workplace for Generation Z through a complex hybrid design. Our goal is to create a workplace suitable for flexibility and collaboration, while considering acoustics, sustainability and future matters. The guiding principles to our design process for Pigment and Gen-Z are diversity, mobility, and balance. Generation Z highly values diversity in terms of identity, in addition to race and gender. Mobility in the workplace has numerous meanings for Gen-Z. Gen-Z individuals are starting to enter the workforce, post-pandemic, and prefer careers that offer hybrid modes of working.
Emma Eschbach & Ava Motley
The Journey of Generation Z
Focusing on designing something fresh for Generation Z was the main objective. This design offers an experiential journey for the users. The biggest design choice was to create corridors spanning the space for the users to explore on their journeys. The five main corridors were designed around 4 experiences Gen Z face and are passionate about, such as wellness, connection to nature, inclusion, and networking. Wellness focuses on mental health, which is a huge topic for Gen Z. The corridor associated with wellness provides a space for users to take a break from work with mind-stimulating activities while being able to gather and participate with others. Connection to nature also ties into wellness because of the calming characteristics associated with it. The nature corridor is spanning from one side entrance to the other providing a long stretch of foliage on the walls, ceilings, and columns. Inclusion was thought of in both an introverted and extroverted manner. Due to the fact that the client requested a hybrid work design, there are many areas for the employees to break away from the typical corporate workstation. These niches are found in the corridor associated with inclusion. Networking is an important aspect of work in every generation. Although, this corridor includes a fresher, lighter look with a living plant wall finished with company branding that doubles as a collaboration zone with tiered seating for the users. To continue the users' experiential journey there are great views overlooking Lake Erie while working at desks and collaboration zones along with choosing materials that reflect a more residential feeling. We chose materials such as carpet, accent pendant lighting, and organic textures like wood, velvet, and knit to make the space feel softer like a home would. This was intended to make employees want to come into the workplace and feel comfortable there when they do choose to come in.
Tiffany Chang & Katherine Zimmerman
Pigment: Designing for Gen-Z
Pigment is a paint and coatings manufacturer that values teamwork, collaboration, and not dictating how their employees work. When designing for Gen-Z, it is integral that the design supports Pigment and their desire to progress forward. The design framework is centered around ideas of fluidity, transition, and flow. This hybrid workplace reflects these ideas through blocking that is a departure from the traditional grid. The push and pull relationship between each block creates seamless, yet deliberate neighbourhoods or “zones” that support numerous work types. The space is welcoming and not overwhelming, aimed to support the return to the office. The spatial organization is governed by colour-blocking as a wayfinding technique, visually separating private offices, large collaborative areas, and everything in between. Considerations include a variety of seating to support many postures, open areas anchored by acoustic solutions or furniture pieces that contribute to one’s sense of place, and more “static” zones broken up by small collaborative or touchdown spaces.
Professor Jill Lahrmer
Throughout this large-scale planning studio sponsored by VOCON, students developed an interior environment for PIGMENT, a 2,000-employee paint and coatings manufacturer located on the coast of Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio. Each of the 4 studio sections were provided a different 32,000 s.f. floor and program supporting a variety of departments and business functions within the 10-story building. PIGMENT asked students to focus on “Reinventing the Workplace” with a dynamic vision of hybrid solutions for remote and in-office functions conceptualized around the motto plan for your work, work for your day. While assessing the office of the future, strong considerations were made for embracing how Generation Z prefers to work, collaborate and innovate. PIGMENT tasked the design team of students with planning for a commitment to diverse work styles, insuring space for quality personal interactions and immersive collaboration. This 3rd year interior design studio maintained a heavy emphasis on teamwork. While students worked individually on construction documents, creative options for the designed space remained a team effort between groups of 2-3 students and teams cross collaborated with other students between floors/studios to develop dynamic solutions.
Stefan Kuljanin and Sean Kirby
PIGMENT - Client Experience
Pigment (a fictional paint company) wants to bring users back into the workplace. Pigment is a paint company, but more than that they are a color company. Being a color company the space can assist in helping employees, and clients understand what it means to feel and experience color. The space will center around bringing in new people, and their employees through their own curiosity. Pocketed through out the space will be inviting moments of experience, that center around collaboration and communication since these two are what is least effective from single at home working. The program will not dictate what needs to be done in spaces, but instead the program will allow people’s curiosity and sense of exploration to determine where they end up in the experience center, and how they choose to experience it. This will be done through the use of mostly soothing neutral tones act as a cave like experience, with moments to saturated color as a reward for discovery. These areas of saturated color will indicate an experience, and act as a contrast to means of egress. Lights will guide the user the space along with the neutral tones, and change in texture will keep users engaged with the surroundings. There would be little to no signage to encourage communication between people, and allow curiosity to guide users through the space, and then reward with experience in the very saturated color areas.
Maya Little and Maliya Sinclair
Pigment : Reimagining Color
Our goal is to create an environment that invites different types of people to come together and share ideas. We want employees to feel reflected within the space while guest feel connected as soon as they walk in. Through space planning we aim to emulate both connectivity and reflectively through the project.
Melina Carna & Elizabeth Brobeck
Pigment
Located along Lake Erie, “PIGMENT” is a 2,000-employee paint and coatings manufacturer based in Cleveland, OH. Through the unitization of Play Theory being the main design driver, Pigment begins a new transformational journey - ‘Reinventing our Workplace.’ As part of this journey, we are implementing a hybrid work model that ties to our global vision and builds on our success.
