Is your home a source of stress or a sanctuary? Discover the principles of The Intuitive Home by Arocordis Design. From acoustic zoning to flicker-free lighting, this Vermont architect’s guide explores how to create a 'Sensory Friendly Home' that supports Autism, ADHD, and Aging-in-Place for a lifetime of well-being.
Harvest Time - Fall brings the gifts of the season forward. So to do we with an update on recent work here in Vermont, some in design, others under construction or now finished. We are grateful to help our clients and their families into their next stage of life with their additions, renovations or new custom designed homes.
Across Vermont, from the Champlain Valley, Central Vermont, to the Northeast Kingdom, families are rediscovering the benefits of living together, spanning generations under one roof. Whether it’s welcoming aging parents with grace, creating a supportive haven for adult children or other family members to stay, or simply choosing a more connected and sustainable way of life, multi-generational homes are an enduring part of Vermont’s values of family and community.
These aren’t just houses; they are homesteads in the making, designed to share resources, strengthen bonds, and deepen our connection to this special place we call home. But creating a home that truly serves….
When deciding between home renovation with additions or custom new construction, families in Central Vermont and beyond often face an important crossroads with no clear answers. At Arocordis Design in scenic Montpelier, we guide families through creating homes that truly reflect their needs and dreams, whether through thoughtful addition and remodeling design or new custom home design.
Homeowners frequently ask us whether they should renovate their existing space or opt for new construction. Four key considerations influence this decision:
·Low-interest rate mortgages make selling and buying new property less appealing.
Growing families need more comfortable living spaces……
In the hills of Central Vermont, a historic 1850s farmhouse once stood as a symbol of family heritage. When fire claimed this beloved home early in 2024, it threatened to erase generations of precious memories. Our Vermont architectural firm, Arocordis Design, is now helping this family create a new chapter in their story through thoughtful custom home design that connects their rich past to an exciting future….
CORA Health Services, Inc. hired Arocordis Design recently to develop concept design and renderings of their soon to open 5,400 SF. Kennerly Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. We worked with their national and regional operations leadership to help them infuse their new space with tasteful brand-focused design....
Earlier in the summer of 2016 we provided interior architectural design services for National Life Group and their just finished reception area renovation at their Dallas area office location serving over 200 plus employees.
Finished this summer, this presents a new face for the Texas location while connecting to company wide aesthetics and brand story. We designed the reception desk area, planter and engineered stone rough and polished cladding, sign marquee (For weight reasons) as well as provided general direction as to wall graphics, furnishings as well as fixed finishes. ...
Growing, an adding team members? Seeking to better align your Place with your Culture and Brand while upping collaboration, engagement and productivity?
Are you and your management team, company leaders struggling with how to best move your office or workplace design project forward?
See this brief video for more on how we can help.
Ever wonder what inspires our architecture and our work with our clients, be they commercial, institutional, or residential? Read on for more about how make it our mission to help you thrive.
Exciting insights and practical advice for startups and maturing technology focused companies in Vermont and beyond. Includes insights on operational strategies and workplace design for collaboration and more.
Problems with distraction and inability to focus?
If you answered yes to any of the questions you likely are experiencing some design shortcoming in the layout, design and detailing of your office or workplace. To help you and others maybe avoid this in the future we offer Seven or so tips which if followed might contribute to a higher performing open office work setting where you can collaborate, innovate yet work in quiet when you need and want it....
Pardon its dog-eared appearance but that's the way it goes for a book which has traveled hundreds of miles, had coffee spilled on it, and been underlined more times than we can count.
Why is it a great business book for a high aspiring business and organization? Friedman takes you behind the scenes, out into the open office, meeting spaces and into the board room
Recently we attended a lunch and learn about some of the key issues facing the State of Vermont in its Tech focused economic development efforts as well as key focuses for the year ahead for the new administration. We heard about statewide economic development efforts from Mike Schirling, Secretary of the State of Vermont Agency of Commerce, Community, Housing and Economic Development. (A mouthful) For a renewed beginning see beta version of www.thinkvt.com. Thanks to Vermont Technology Alliance for spearheading this and Logic Supply for hosting the lunch and learn.
Innovation center, maker hubs
Accelerators and incubator ecosystem
Enhance coworking opportunities
Better and more fiber
Access to capital
Integrated communication
Easier customer experience navigating permitting, contracting
Smooth access to needed agency services.
Vermont Senate and Vermont House of Representatives economic development committees please support additional funding for the Agency to market the whole story of Vermont rather than no funding. This story spans across tourism, technology, sustainable business in technology, agriculture, food and spirits, our historic downtowns and naturalbeauty, entrepreneurialism and more?
Lots to keep talking about these issues Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR), Vermont Chamber, Vermont Business Roundtable, Vermont Business Magazine, Seven Days, Burlington Free Press and keep the conversation going. Vermont needs to thrive for the generations to follow. Lots of work to do, bills and important cross party lines and advocacy conversations to have.
Confused about how to accelerate and inspire innovation in your office or workplace through its layout, design and culture building? To help, we share some insight garnered from an interesting Steelcase white paper "How Place Fosters Innovation." With its evergreen advice, we continue to refer to and share it with clients and partners year after year in our work with others. We feel its insights help frame and shape innovation related organizational thinking and workplace design strategies for large and small businesses alike.
Today's hyper-competitive business environments, whether in public, private or nonprofit sectors, demand high performing organization naturally seek a state of innovation, continuous learning and a growth mindset. Successful companies adopt a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. To cultivate authentic and sustainable growth, especially with a focus on seeding innovation, mindset matters.
Frequently though, we find the Place where people work and How they work misaligned with the needs of the business or organization adopting an innovation mindset.
Frankly the office and workplace falls short!
We believe attuned place design supporting this natural drive for innovation can power healthy disruptive and sustainable growth, all the while providing the right resources for day to day work, pointing the way towards enduring success.
The Steelcase White Paper offers a framework for organizations to assess why, how, who and what is the work primary to their business. Through it, with the help of architects like ourselves and other consultants, they assess the kind of work culture they currently have, the work processes valuable to them today, and what they strive for in coming future that might be different than today with a growth mindset. In light of this continuum, we believe it is critical to view your workplace as an ecosystem of flexible spaces and resources supporting your people doing their work. whether face to face and or virtual collaboration, heads down focus work, customer service, communication, potential development and human resources, training and development and more.
“The right kinds of spaces can help people collaborate, share knowledge, learn together and build social networks of trustful interactions so critical to solving big challenges.”
Aligning Place to purpose, needed work processes and collaboration requires choices of how, where and when to do differing kinds of work. We like to think of the office or workplace, or business as a unique organizational and space ecosystem. We use the concept of ecosystem to describe the workplace as an integration of people working within and together in their physical spaces, along with supporting technology, furniture, building systems and organizational systems. Doing so redirects the conversation away from entitled "I" space to empowered "We" spaces whether at the scale of one person, a small team or grouping of teams within a larger whole.
Ecosystem thinking also acknowledges the changing dynamics of an organization, its culture and broader identity. Organizations themselves have lifespans and experience stages of growth, transformation. maturity and rebirth. Given these life cycles, placing them within a workplace ecosystem mindset seems entirely logical. Startup, mid-stage, mature and legacy phases constitute the major chapters of organizational life which if anything is dynamic rather than fixed.
This evolving process of carrying out and doing your business and its work befits what is really happening; we are all works in progress. And yes work is messy, held together in some cases literally and/or metaphorically by duct tape more often than we like to admit, and full of failures which inspire potential future success. Like natural systems, your organization fits into an eco-system with all of its parts and pieces serving some kinds of inter-related purpose.
We think the first step to more clearly understanding your organization's innovation oppourtunity is to closely examine and reflect together on what's your purpose and the primary motivations behind what you do. Or don't do.
First look at your organization in the mirror with your team. Do you have a clear sense of mission and purpose? Having a collective sense of identity and purpose forms a cultural glue uniting individuals into teams of mission driven performers able to carry out at different times, disruptive and sustaining innovation. If you lack organizational clarity and passion about your mission and core purpose likely it will be difficult to innovate together.
The other aspect of this lies in the your organizational size and how your group, team or self fits into the overall whole. Whether you have three or 5,000 colleagues makes a difference in how to work with an innovation mindset. With smaller size comes greater agility and quick adaptability to change processes, tools and use your spaces differently. The larger you are, the more complex the innovation equation becomes. Also the greater oppourtunity.
Regardless of size, make sure you have a clear sense of mission and purpose and you authentically as individuals and teams can connect with it. If you don't, you have a terrific opportunity to codevelop and collaborate together on redefining your core mission and values. Then you will be ready to innovate together whether in disruptive or sustaining ways. The reason is you will already be innovating working hard together to cultivate and build your culture.
Examine closely your ratios of how you actually work right now regarding how much is individual, group, collaborative and distributed work. Distributed work may be an unfamiliar term to you.
“In an increasingly global marketplace, a distributed workforce frees a business from the conventional constraints of time zones and work schedules, allowing work to be done seven days a week, 24 hours a day if necessary.”
You may think you work in a traditional office setting with most people working out of your office. But do you really? You likely already work on the distributed work continuum. How often do you work from home, a local coffeeshop, park bench holding video calls with team members across numerous time zones and cultures? Likely much more than you did five or ten years ago.
Where you work right now, how much space is devoted to individual workspaces versus common work areas including social, learning and cafe spaces? Today's newer space ratios range closer to 60/40% for individual to common to 50/50 or even 30 / 70% in organizations taking pride in a more "We" focused culture.
In general today's innovation focused business work with less dedicated personal workspace emphasizing instead shared spaces ranging from heavily social to extremely focused increasingly popular quiet spaces. Looking around your workplace do you see those ratios or do you see those from ten to fifteen years ago with a much higher amounts of owned workspace and less meeting spaces.
An informal collaboration space, Steelcase Global HQ - Grand Rapids, MI by Stephen Ml Frey
Depending on what your work is, you likely collaborate with partners and team members working from home, coworking spaces, other subcontractors assisting you with specialized services from a far needing occasional onsite workspaces. The ratio of personally committed "owned" workspace versus shared in common, collaborative and just-in time work areas is very different than even five or ten years ago.
You probably already work with virtual collaboration spaces like GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, Skype for Business, Facetime or Duo. Some of you work like this daily, others less frequently. This shared virtual working is distributed working. Compared to 10 years ago and technology tools available then, today's tools offer unparalleled convenience, ease of use and collaborative functionality. Plain and simple, we are all working differently and by extension, innovating in new ways. We can only expect this level of disruption of how we work to continue infinitely.
So honestly, you're working more differently than ever before. So then, what models of innovation might work best for your organization, your work, purpose and brand? Your why?
"Some organizations look inward; others look externally for fresh ideas and new ways of solving problems." From Steelcase's research perspective they have eight or so models spanning the innovation spectrum from centralized (closely held, proprietary) to decentralized (open or crowd sourced and more). Where and how do you do your best work, where you and your coworkers thrive in regards to innovation? Choosing one requires close examination of your organizational leadership style and how you collaborate well as well as your purpose.
Those models of innovation are:
Depending on the kind of business you're in, your size and organizational complexity, one or a hybrid combination of the above will likely fit. In our design practice, we have worked in a variety of models to best help our clients with organizational fit to purpose. For some larger ones we act almost as an embedded design and innovation consultant. For smaller ones we act in the consultancy role as outside architectural design experts working on a project by project basis. Or we work on larger project design teams whether leading the overall effort on behalf of the client or participating as a team member among many.
Finding the right model also speaks to where your organization is in its life space and maturity. The model you choose to work with also echoes your leadership model and style. as well as active practice of innovation with recurrent and well supported work processes and resources. Choosing a decentralized crowd sourced innovation model within a heavily centralized leadership model may not align, however alternatively, following it may fuel disruptive innovation difficult to achieve within such an organization and its prevailing leadership style.
Defining the fit of innovation efforts to your organizational purpose is extremely important. Part of this plays into understanding if your are looking for sustaining innovation or disruptive innovation outcomes. Examining innovation models in the context of space design and layout is an essential next step.
So then, how to foster innovation by design? Here are a few principles borrowed from the Steelcase research as well as augmented in (parentheses) by us from our own practice and applied research experience.
Since work processes, technology continue to evolve in truly breakneck speed many of these above ideas may well need to be dramatically rethought and re examined in coming years. How will machine learning and artificial intelligence impact innovation process and capacity development? Could be extremely powerful in regards to inventing many new possibilities arriving from human and AI collaboration. While the future is unclear in respect to AI, our shared drive for new ideas and impulse to innovate remain constant.
Remember sharing purpose and cause fuels your drive to innovate and cultivate the right kinds of workspace and culture to do this important work. We believe without this cultural glue your innovation efforts will falter and lack purpose, with stunted success. In the meanwhile, keep aspiring to do good things and keep a steady supply of duct tape around.
You will need it! Do you follow or practice an innovation mindset or framework similar to what we share here? Do you practice any of these innovation design principles? Or do you see different forces at play impacting how, where and why you work? Please share in the comments sections below. Let's build a dialogue.
Contact us if you have more questions or if you want to learn more about how to apply this Innovation Framework to your business or organization by design. We want to help you thrive.
