MEDIA CENTRE : AN ALTERNATIVE WORKPLACE

Abstract

The thesis is to explore the design of an alternative workplace for a particular business, taking into consideration two important conditions that cause the paradigm shift of office design - the change of management style and the advent of wireless communication. With more companies abandoning the top-down management style in favour of the decentralized system, and the breakthrough in information technology and wireless communication that enables information to be ubiquitous, employees become more mobile and independent. Space and time of the office, thus, could be used in new ways. The vehicle chosen to demonstrate the thesis is a Media Centre - a multi-tenanted complex for media-related small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These companies comprise a wide range of professionals who are highly mobile and require a variety of work environments. As it is crucial for them to always stay at the frontier of technological advancement, their work environment is among the first to experience changes in the Information Age. The proposed site is a triangular plot of land at Selegie Road, surrounded by various media-related activities. With higher mobility and independence for the employees, the thesis proposed that all locations and facilities of a workplace should be thought of as a dynamic system. The workplace should consist of a variety of task-based work settings that cater for the need of a range of isolated and interactive work. These settings would be shared by individuals who would move between them. Thus, the strategy is to design value-added work settings by taking advantage of the site and incorporating the surroundings into the work settings. With the opportunities to rethink an office building as a box-like container, the design intends to blur the separation of public and private spaces, taking into consideration both the need of providing security for the offices as well as the joy of threading through the media workplace.