Issue Analysis: The Living Office Placemaking process can be too lengthy for most project timelines, resulting in the ideology rarely being used. This also means certified salespeople and designers are left without first hand experience conducting Discovery Sessions.

Learning Objectives: Introduce learners to a condensed version of the Placemaking process through a practice exercise with a hypothetical client in order to increase application of Living office ideology and prepare learners for real-world client scenarios.

Audience: Living Office Certified commercial furniture designers and salespeople

Content: Slides with audio, visuals, and interactive activities

Tools Used: Articulate Storyline, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, AutoCAD

Get To Know The Client

Activities Prioritization Sessions are conducted in-person with clients, allowing designers and salespeople to ask detailed questions about their work style and company culture. This training introduces learners to a hypothetical client through visuals of their floor plan and images of their employees at work, and walks them through those details in order to prepare them to do a practice session later in the training.

Activities Prioritization

After learning about the client and discovering how their employees work, learners are guided through an interactive slide where they sort each Living Office Activity by how important they think it is to the client and whether or not that activity is properly supported in their existing space. With each selection, audio and visuals appear to explain why certain activities should be considered high or low priority.

Activities To Settings

After discovering which activities are most important to the client, learners answer some more specific questions about how and where those activities should be performed in order to find out which Living Office Settings would best support them. Sometimes there is more than one right answer, meaning that multiple settings might be required to support each activity.

Activities Improvements

After completing the Activities Prioritization activity and translating the findings into Living Office Settings, learners are shown how those new settings support the company’s work style and culture. This section of the training places the old floor plans right up against the proposed changes to fully demonstrate the benefits that these types of explorations can bring to projects.