How AI is helping architects change workplace design

“I have been a workplace designer for the past 24 years,” said architect Arjun Kaicker. “I’ve seen more change in the last 24 months than I’ve seen in my entire career.”

Mr. Kaicker is a co-owner of Zaha Hadid Analytics + Insights, or ZHAI, a five-person team that uses data and artificial intelligence to design workplaces. The team is part of Zaha Hadid Architectsthe office founded by the influential architect Zaha Hadid in London in 1979.

“The pandemic has really boosted innovation in the workplace,” said Mr. Kaicker in a recent video interview from Atlanta.

Back in the day, “most office buildings had a one-size-fits-all desk for everyone, and the same environment around them, the same everything,” he said.

Now that they’re back at their desks, “people are asking for more choice, more personalization and more mobility.”

To address the changing landscape of work, the company has turned to AI to help its architects design better office buildings and spaces that meet the individual needs of employees.

While numerous architectural firms around the world are deploying digital data in this way – including Foster + Partners, also headquartered in London, and US firms HOK and NBBJ – Zaha Hadid Architects is one of the few with a dedicated in-house team.

Historically, offices have been designed based on org charts to “see who reports to whom and which departments may need to sit next to each other,” and observational studies or employee surveys, said Jeremy Myerson, co-author of “Unworking: the reinvention of the modern office”, in a telephone interview.

Today, with employees often working both from home and the office, “companies just can’t afford to have pieces of real estate that are underutilized for a week,” he said. Many companies are using algorithms and machine intelligence “to have a much more real-time, dynamic reading of what’s happening in space.”

Sensors track people and environmental conditions – temperature, air quality, noise levels, humidity, carbon dioxide levels and daylight. Architects and workplace designers then compare that data to get a better picture of actual needs.

And they’re leveraging the data: they’re moving coffee shops and pantries to more popular corners, rearranging furniture and desks, redesigning lighting, repositioning people at desks that are better suited to their jobs, and using partitions in smarter ways.

Why is workplace design not more common as an in-house department at architectural firms? Because the firms see it as commercial and corporate, said Patrik Schumacher, who succeeded Ms Hadid as director of the company. (Ms. Hadid died in 2016.) They prefer to design museums and homes, when in fact offices are “where wealth and wealth are generated,” he said.

Since ZHAI, which architect Ulrich Blum co-directs with Mr. Kaicker, was founded in December 2015, it has worked on more than 100 construction projects, at least 60 percent of which are offices.

At the company’s London headquarters, Mr. Blum explained that unlike cars and electronic devices, a building in the 21st century is not as responsive and sophisticated as it could be.

While buildings often have state-of-the-art air conditioning, lighting and security systems, “It’s still a challenge to get all those systems to communicate seamlessly,” Mr Blum said. ZHAI wants to change that with the help of a large number of new tools and technologies.

As he spoke, AI-generated office floor plans flickered on a large screen in front of him, with green and red dots representing the most and least desirable desk positions.

Mr Blum said ZHAI had a computer tool that could come up with 100,000 building interior designs in 27 hours; an architect would have to make 40 drawings a day for ten years to offer so many options. He clicked open a series of diagrams for the fluid, futuristic Infinity Plaza in Guangzhou, China, which the company designed. With AI, possibilities have been devised to position parts of the core of the building, such as pipes, stairwells and elevator shafts.

Privacy is a major concern when it comes to AI-enabled workplace design. If companies can see in detail who does what, where and when, they can violate employee privacy and use the data against them.

While the data is collected and harvested anonymously, some are concerned that “there’s a supervisor in your machine,” said Mr Myerson, noting that people were reluctant to have their data collected, even if it related to how offices collectively experienced.

He pointed to an example: in January 2016 The Daily Telegraph in London installed desk monitors with heat and motion sensors under each employee’s desk to improve office energy efficiency, but these were immediately withdrawn after privacy complaints by the National Union of Journalists, the UK’s main journalists’ union.

Mr. Schumacher pointed out the need for protections in tracking systems. “Companies must take responsibility,” he said. “We need to make sure that when these systems are used in offices to draw conclusions and make things better, they are not some kind of alien control system that we’ve been tracking individuals with to punish them.”