Kollider is a technology start-up incubator who have recently moved to Castle House, a Grade II listed building in Sheffield. The building has recently been refurbished to provide a new 9,200m2 shell and core base build over four floors for Kollider and its associated incubator business tenants.

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Kollider engaged Ollio and our Innovate UK research team to work with perspective tenants Barclays Media Labs, TMI Recording Studios and The Writers Collective, a start-up music writing business to arrive at a customer led interior design for 1800m2 on second floor (150 desks).

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Barclays Media Labs were the anchor tenant for the floor, and both TMI and Writers Collective remained unsure about the concept of placing their new ventures within a building that was so multi-purpose.

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WHAT USERS WANTED

Our process commenced with an “ideas” charrette with TMI. From the discussion we learned TMI was already a well-established media and entertainment agency with key customers that included ITV, Channel 4, and BSkyB.  They also have a franchise in Dice Recordings, the record label for several headline “grime” music artists.

The business acts as an agency for their “stable” of artists to provide them with all the support they need to get their music and creative products in front of the right audience and marketed to a highly professional level.  The TMI delivery teams told us how their work streams can be highly erratic, sometimes involving long hours to get the product out of the door against challenging deadlines.  User told us how sometimes they would work through the night to get the product to the artist customer on time.

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The Ollio and TMI Barclays and WC teams spent time in understanding the precise delivery journey with all three tenants, to arrive at a complete picture of each and their operational imperatives.

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DESIGN REFLECTION

With all the ideas in mind, and a clear understanding of the requirement the co-designing Scrum Teams arrived at a floor plan. The layout placed the reception and Barclay’s Media Lab at the centre of the space.  To the left a long thin domain was created for TMI and their recording studio. The location next to the main stair gave them a strong branded presence on exiting the lifts onto the second floor.  It also allowed the technical aspects of the design to deal with the challenging acoustic separation issues.

 

Meanwhile the TMI delivery teams scoped out what they required, while still working inside challenging footprint (rental) constraints. This is where VR came into its own in enabling the users to better appreciate the spaces created and to modify them by trading important with not so important floor area allowances.  There were many surreal moments on the project, none more so than when the CEO of TMI spent over 30 minutes exploring his fully immersive virtual recording and photographic studios, visiting the entire space providing in-depth operational feedback as he visited each space in turn.

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