Jean Bellas

Accept it. Embrace it. Mold it. Space is your friend.

This is the doctrine of Space, a forward-thinking workplace design firm that exists somewhere in the international ether. A true embodiment of its own guiding principles, Space outsmarted the traditional limitations of location and distance by launching three national headquarters (Chicago, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area) simultaneously four years ago. Since then, the versatile innovators have opened four additional offices in an effort to accommodate corporations looking to maintain a universal brand across oceans and cultures.

The Space matrix - the company's four interlocking departments including Systems Consulting, Research, Facility Management, and Design and Development - today serves more than 30 clients including Amazon.com, Leo Burnett, Charles Schwab, and Price Waterhouse. Each company, each project, each set of expectations is a unique experience for Space, says Founder and President Jean Bellas. In this Fast Company interview, Bellas discusses the evolution of workplace design and development, the importance of synergy, and the strategies Space uses to gather and synthesize employee input.

How have you seen priorities in workplace design shift during the last 25 years? And how do those shifts define the way you operate Space?

My shift in business had very much to do with my internal need for attracting and retaining staff. Space is all about creating an organization where people can really belong, agree with the philosophy, understand the work, and have the challenges in front of them that they can really strive to achieve. To explain the work itself, in response to the issues of the workplace, I'm going to have to take you through a little bit of historic thinking about space.

Go back to the '70s for a moment. When corporations were building buildings in the '70s, there was a view toward the long-term. They were putting up a building that was going to last forever. This was going to be a headquarters because business was basically run out of one central location, and the major emphasis was not on the interior of the space. It was on the building of the building. Trends were consistent up until about mid '85, when we saw the first major influences of technology in the workplace. The portability of bringing a computer to the desk started encouraging some real significant re-thinking of what was going on in terms of interior environments. Buildings hadn't been designed to accommodate personal technology. And in this first grappling with technology, there was money starting to be spent on infrastructure. How do you get the cabling to the desk? How do you get enough power to the desks? Up to that time, it was rather ad hoc. You'll see old pictures of the terminal, PCs on desks, oceans of cabling and uncontrolled spaces, very little regard for the interface between people and equipment.

Then, as the equipment started to mount, even more complicated things started to happen, in that the environment around the people started to become less supportive of the work they were doing. The lighting was awful with glare problems. There was no air around people, and the equipment was generating heat. At the same time, companies were starting to pull people together in more collaborative, more interactive ways of working. So there are these workplace dynamics coming to play. The accumulation of information is also allowing decisions to be made a lot faster, and the decision making process is reinforcing organizational change at a much higher rate

Now we start introducing things like networks. Companies move very quickly away from being a single-location organization or a decentralized organization. Before, they couldn't manage information in multiple locations, so they set up a series of leaders in various offices. Then, when you start to network information, all of a sudden you can start to rethink centralization, and reinforce consistency and standardize the company. Now, not only do you have dramatic changes going on in organizations at a single geography, you start to multiply it and have it going on at a global level. You also start to think about space as a tool of a business. Space becomes a fact of life. How you use that space, what it looks like, is a variable.

How have startup Internet companies accelerated the decision-making processes even more?