Design from the inside

Imagine you’re an architect hired to redesign the floorplan of an office. The company hiring you has grown from 10-100 employees and wants to make sure the space is easy to navigate and the common areas are in the optimal location. You ask the client for the existing floorplan, but nobody can find the original drawings. They’d be useless anyway, because as the company has grown, the employees have been given license to change the space as they see fit. Their modifications range from simple decorating to major renovations. One employee walled off an entire corner of the office for themselves and nobody has seen them in weeks. No single employee can draw the floorplan from memory. Walking the space, you discover they’ve added three sets of bathrooms — as the office got more and more byzantine, it became easier to hire a contractor to build new bathrooms than to find the existing ones. Signage is a joke, and asking for directions is useless: everyone thinks they remember where things…