Spacefinish

STAYafrica

WORKING SPACES

Going to work can be a bit of a chore to some people, but not if you’re a lucky enough to work in an office designed by Nigerian company Spacefinish. With features such as stationary bikes as work desk seats, armchairs made out of makoko boats and mudhut-themed meeting rooms, Spacefinish’s ingenious designs for Fortune 500 companies and startups alike make the workplace a beautiful and exciting place to be and can’t help but motivate staff. Company CEO Remi Dada (right) talks to FLYafrica about creating a better world for humans to live and work in.

Q. You were given a day a week to work on the idea of Spacefinish while you were an employee of Google. Was this kind of workplace flexibility to allow workers to pursue their passions an influence on you when you were creating inspirational workspaces yourself? A. Working as a Googler brought me so much inspiration because I got to work out of some of the best designed and most innovative office spaces in the world, across Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, and the Middle East.

Google allowed me to fuel my creative outlet by providing me with the opportunity to spend 20 per cent of my time working on a passion project. And I was lucky that I got to design and build the Google office as my 20 per cent project! The

goal was simply to provide the best work environment for my coworkers and myself. And the rest is history...

Q. What are the key aims for you and your team when designing workspaces? A. At Spacefinish we truly want to create a better world for humans to live and work in. We have decided to begin this journey by focusing on the

workspace, a place where we spend 80 per cent of our time. To improve how people experience the workspace, we aim to design spaces that inspire teams to be more productive, innovative and collaborative. We employ a human-centered approach to design solutions; carefully focusing on how people work and interact. Spacefinishers understand that an office area must first meet the needs of the people who use the workspace daily.

Q. You’ve designed office space for banks as well as start-ups and technology companies. Are they receptive to some of your quirkier ideas such as phone booths for private meetings etc? A. The core of every design solution we proffer reflects a precise understanding of the needs of the users because we understand how design can shape or influence human behaviour. Through research, we take insights into how our clients work, collaborate and communicate. In turn, these insights informed our design decisions to develop new solutions such as phone booths for private meetings, mobile writable trolleys for flexible and spontaneous brainstorming, and other bold ideas that redefine the workplace like the life-size train converted into a workspace for our client at Renmoney. This has made clients’ reception of our out-of-the-box ideas generally warm because they trust our process of proffering design solutions that address relatable problems they battle with on a daily basis.

Q. Redesigning the Google office space in Lagos showcased your talents and brought you a huge amount of high-profile custom in just three years. Are you surprised by the success and how do you see the future for Spacefinish mapping out? A. The design of the Google Nigeria office did open up lots of business opportunities for us. And while we are happy with our impact so far, we can’t ignore the fact that we weren’t able to work with everyone

The workplace is where we spend 80 per cent of our time. We aim to design spaces that inspire teams to be more productive, innovative and collaborative

who reached out to work with us. However, going forward our amazing product team has been working on a solution to make our service more ubiquitous and available to smallerscaled clients, and that is why we are excited to announce that in 2020 we would be launching an easy-to-use online service called DesignMatchup, which matches StartUps and SMEs (who otherwise cannot afford our enterprise services) with Spacefinish vetted design partners and builders at an affordable price. We are presenting a new way to work with us!

Q. A lot of your spaces draw heavily on African iconography and tribal traditions. Why is this important to you and your clients? A. Our approach to the spaces we design is not monolithic. However, based on the needs of the clients we have worked with, many of our design directions have taken significantly from the African cultural motifs because we are in an age where there is more awareness towards identity, and as a result, our clients strive to create culturally relevant offices that reflect the identity of their employees.

Q. You have worked in some of the best office spaces in the world. I’m sure you have also seen and perhaps worked in, some bad ones. What do you see as the problem with standard office spaces? A. The problem with standard office spaces is that historically architects have designed spaces for one type of individual profile - hence the boring cubical systems from the 1970s. But as we have evolved in the work-space we are now aware of the fact that you need a diverse workforce to remain competitive and innovative. The solution to this problem is that it is now even more important to design for the multiple individual profile types in a workspace - the introverted, the extroverted, the conformist, the rebel...etc - all these profiles need to express themselves in unique ways that allow each of them to maximise how the work.

Q. I read that when you were younger you fancied yourself as a rapper. How far did you get with this? Did you release any tracks? Are the Spacefinish team ever treated to some of your raps now at office parties? A. (Laughs) Yes, I still rap occasionally. For me, my passion for rap stems from a childhood love of creating something out of nothing. Occasionally I get to trade bars with some of the rappers and singers at the Spacefinish office!