In February 2018, Pilbrow & Partners were appointed, following an invited competition, to enhance the working environment for the operations team at the Francis Crick Institute.

The operations department provides administrative support for the 1500 scientists and researchers working collaboratively across multiple disciplines. P & P’s design, recently completed, facilitates and improves these working relationships by enabling open dialogue and meliorating cooperation and wellbeing within the office environment.

The new design improves the working environment for the 250-staff operations team by: introducing and catering towards current movements in office working (agile working, co-working); improving team satisfaction, productivity and wellbeing; improving professional relationships and knowledge-sharing between the operations team and research groups; creating additional formal and informal meeting spaces and creating a sense of place and identity.

The design proposals were grounded in detailed and extensive research into the functional interrelationships across departments within operations. Face to face interviews, workshops and online questionnaires sought detail on how teams operated and their level of satisfaction with the current working environment.

P & P developed specialist AI algorithms to test and appraise potential design scenarios. P & P sought knowledge from specialists in pedestrian movement, environmental design and lighting design to inform approaches to working in this complex interdisciplinary space. Working extensively with scale models, P & P communicated developments in the evolving design and sought stakeholder engagement with these proposals.