Mix Roundtable: Are tailored experiences the future?

Words and moderated by: Harry McKinley

It’s a chilly winter’s day in London, late afternoon and already dark; raindrops hanging in the air despite the biting wind. Close to Liverpool Street station, the streets are crowded with umbrellas and damp, black coats. It may seem a pretty inauspicious time for a roundtable, but inside the Aqua Libra showroom the mood is different: all bright lights, gleaming surfaces and billboards featuring dewy fruit. We’ve gathered to discuss tailored experiences and the contrast between outside and within is a regular point of conversation as our guests arrive and shirk off layers.

“Part of feeling special in a space is the sense of anticipation,” explains Product Director, Beyond the Bottle, Noel Dickson, gesturing at our surroundings, our assembled experts now seated, “in other words feeling like somebody’s anticipated your needs. It can be quite an emotional connection, whether it’s in a workplace or hospitality setting. It’s the sense that there’s the hidden hand of design that just gets it right for you.”

The notion that how we arrive into a space sets the tone and conveys, both quickly and subliminally, whether an environment has been engineered with a particular group or individual in mind instantly resonates. The traditional reception desk, as a concept, gets a thrashing.

“Formal reception desks in workplaces,” starts tp bennett’s Mariachiara Dal Pozzo with an eye roll. “Why can’t we explore something more approachable, something more about human connection? If someone is in a wheelchair, for example, it just feels like a barrier. As designers, that’s something we should be pushing back on now.”

“How you’re welcomed into an office ripples through the day,” continues BDP’s Nigel Coutts, “and that welcome is central to building a tailored experience, from the outset, that feels right for a particular organisation.”

It’s here that the conversation pivots to hospitality, an industry that has traditionally considered first impressions and experience management much more than the world of work.

“Hotels and restaurants, for example, have always considered the balance of service and design,” explains Ruby Fieldhouse, Squire & Partners, “and it’s that approach that needs to be adopted in the workplace; thinking about how the way we arrive into a restaurant – where the service style is personalised depending on the venue – can be translated into the office.”

More broadly, the challenge then becomes how one designs collectively for the individual, the smaller group (or tribe) and the many.

“But do we really need to design for the many?” posits Conran and Partners’ Tina Norden. “If you’re not designing for a tribe, or a certain type of individual, then you’re trying to be everything to everyone which doesn’t work. When designing a hotel, it absolutely has to have a point of view, its own attitude and a unique story. If that isn’t right for a particular person, they can go somewhere else. But it’s also a fine line between designing for a type of person and a single person. We’re sometimes going too far down the individualistic route and whether it’s a hotel or a workplace, it doesn’t really matter, it’s perhaps more about a niche community.”

Agreeing, Dickson notes that developing personalised experiences is really about the sweet spot between everyone and just one: “otherwise you end up with Frankenstein’s monster, which no one wants. The question is how every person can feel that a space, product or experience speaks to them individually, when the reality is that you can’t do or be everything for everyone.”

When it comes to the workplace in particular, this is perhaps one of the greatest challenges of our times; when offices need to evolve to justify their existence and when employees demand environments that sate their emotional and psychological needs, as well as their physical ones. Then, of course, there are the heightened expectations that their desires, as well as their needs, will be catered to.

Jolie’s Franky Rousell argues we need a fundamental rethink of how workplaces are culturally positioned and practically designed. “The thing that’s really interesting about a tailored experience is that it connects to exclusivity. Private member’s clubs are becoming more and more popular, and there are lots of sectors looking at how they can borrow from this. So what if we started to reframe employment as membership; that when you win an employment contract you win a form of membership? It forces us to reframe the office as a member’s club and devise spaces that make people feel special, and offer an experience that not everyone can have. As humans we love a sense of possession, that something is for ‘us’ and we own it.”

Can we ever really ‘own’ an office, though? The days of pinned family photos and browning pot plants as a means to personalise soulless banks of desks feels more than vaguely depressing, not to mention a relic of a different age of work. But when our homes – now our workplaces some or most of the time – are so innately individual, can the office ever feel as bespoke?

“It’s about adaptability,” says Studio Moren’s Nikita Wilson. “It’s the overused buzzword of the moment, but for a reason. Even hotels are leaning into adaptability to capture workers, giving people different ways of using spaces or just different types of spaces, from meeting rooms and coworking areas to more private working facilities in rooms. Again, hospitality is setting a good benchmark. Hotel rooms are designed to be flexible, so a guest can use and tailor the space to their needs. Sometimes someone might want to work at a desk, at other times lying on the bed. We need to look at workplaces in the same way; design them with that in mind.”

“We also have to give people permission to make use of that adaptability in the office,” emphasises Coutts. “Because right now we really need to consider how to get people together and, as designers, perhaps we’re not always getting it right. But adaptability is important because not only does it allow people to tailor how they use a space, but the reality is we don’t know where things are going. Flexible furniture can do a lot for an organisation, but it’s also helpful from the perspective of: we don’t know where we’ll be, how things will change, or what we’ll need in five years time.”

With the route ahead so changeable, it’s tricky to agree on absolutes. Are tailored experiences the future? The honest answer seems to be: who knows? Certainly the table agrees they have a place for now, but when it comes to looking forward, they also agree the future currently feels an unknowable place. For Fieldhouse, the key to planning for today, and tomorrow, is in creating connections between the personal and professional.

“We’re designers but we’re also people,” she notes. “If we sometimes take the time to consider what we would want, how we would use a space or what we would want a product to deliver, then we can start there and design for that.”