When first walking in the door of 70 Ionia, visitors are greeted by four small signs, quietly announcing that
Steelcase,
Wolverine World Wide,
Alticor and
Meijer use space here. However, there is little indication of which floor or what departments you might find if you were to wander around. There's not much else for adornment. The first office on the first floor is mostly glass, completely covered in post it notes -- a sort of office gestalt wallpaper. There is no receptionist (please check in on the fourth floor), no real lobby or the usual guest check-in complete with security passes and a spread of 18-month-old boating magazines. In many ways, a visitor's first impression is minimal and sparse, although the designers would probably prefer the word 'understated.'
There are very few doors, few separated rooms and no cubicles. This is design hub GRid70, and business is different here.
The story of GRid70 is not a story of architecture or downtown real estate (although it is the first genuine downtown presence for most of the companies). It's not a story just about money, or design or creative people in a collaborative space. GRid70 is making something new, to refashion isolated, fief-driven company cultures into a co-operative, collaborative, distributed environment.
Very large and often successful companies generally don't like the idea of having their designers, r&d people and long-term strategists sharing with people who work for companies with a different stock index or shareholders. But Wolverine World Wide joined hands with Amway, Steelcase and Meijer.
Before moving to GRid70, all shoe design operations at Wolverine World Wide were segregated from each other, divided by brands and walls. Designers spent their time with sales, marketing and accounting people all from the same brand. Different brands did design in different buildings on different floors, all divided into fiefdoms.
"This was a cultural revolution for Wolverine" says Rob Koenen, VP and general manager of Caterpillar shoes. "None of these people knew each other 12 months ago. Every designer was in their own separate brand -- nobody knew anybody else."
Shoe design was moved to GRid70, where walking around the third or fourth floor, you're better off looking at the work on people's desks to figure out what brand they work for, since every other traditional label has been removed. There are no cubicles, few walls, no confining spaces. Wolverine World Wide has shifted the entire culture of its design process in a complete reversal of tradition. Designers from different brands are cross collaborating, and doing so with a surprising lack of ego and territorialism.
"You put people in a creative environment and the creativity flows," says Koenen.
Seth Starner, manager of business innovation consulting at Amway, shares Koenen's point of view. "We have to acknowledge the nurturing to the soul that comes with space," he says. "I spend more time in my office then in my home, but I have less control of the space in my cubicle than I do in my own house."
As a part of his responsibilities, Starner and his team must synthesize large amounts of information in ways that are more intuitive than can be accomplished by spreadsheet. To do this, Starner places his massive collection of color-coded post-it notes on large foam core boards where he and his team can see everything, move data around and analyze it in a meaningful fashion.
"We were able to do one year's worth of collaborative work in 12 weeks," he says. "Not all work can be done this way, but the efficiency gains are huge."
Achieving these gains also included moving and removing tables and chairs, temporarily filling nearly 2,000 square feet of space with accessible information that can be easily organized. In levering the space, Alticor is not alone. In many ways, the open floor plan and environmental plasticity is a mirror of the culture that has flourished here.
"We talk about collaboration, but the thing that is most interesting to me is the relationships that we've built," says John Malnor, VP of growth initiatives for Steelcase. "The value is in these other points of view that you can tap into very quickly. It's like having your own mentors to reach out to for solving problems -- your own community." The working distance between these companies and many of these departments was filled with barriers both mental and physical, but at GRid70, the distance between major companies is only a few footsteps.
These relationships are not just built on sharing business wisdom, but also research and ideas. All four companies recognize the need to understand younger markets. As a group, the companies dedicated an entire day to learning and sharing their independent market research and analysis in a dramatic departure of the vertical information sharing that most large corporations embrace. There have been other examples, such as sharing supply chain contacts or research on odor-free, puncture-resistant fabric (both Wolverine and Steelcase have a close interest here), or the latest recipe created by Meijer.
This collaborative, productive environment was not by accident. All interior furnishing and decor are the result of decades of research and study by Steelcase, but GRid70 is much more then the carefully designed furniture and conference rooms.
"Culture doesn't just happen, it has to be built," says Starner. And it really does, in ways that can be hard to quantify, but that can be the tricky part of culture. And as culture becomes more networked across social and national boundaries, creating spaces that cultivates culture is more an art than a science.
"[Wolverine World Wide's] Blake Krueger's vision was 'I want one plus one to equal three; I want these people to come together and create more,' and it's worked," says Koenen. "And now, in GRid70, the designers are more enthused [and] the brand is better, with better designs coming out."
As Seth Starner says, space matters and so does culture. GRid70 was designed to attract talented young designers, but in the process, they managed to make something more than just a cool spot to work; they've embraced a paradigm shift in design and innovation.
Who knows what the next six months at GRid70 will reveal?
Adam Bird is a photographer and writer who makes pictures that tell stories, writes stories that share pictures and who is insatiably curious about how everything works. On twitter, @AdamBirdPhoto, or on Facebook.