O.P.H.D.

Studio Shajay Bhooshan

Tutor Ariadna Lopez

Consultant Andy Watts

Team Hao Jiang, Ling Mao, Yutong Xia, Ziyu Song

With the rapid expansion of internet companies, large campus headquarters have become a standard practice for big internet companies, providing a working environment for thousands of people. However, these large-scale headquarter buildings are not suitable for urban centres; land prices in urban central areas are increasing rapidly, the surrounding built environment is highly complex, and the spatial and temporal aggregation of population increases the pressure in certain areas of the centre, in terms of traffic and accessibility. At the same time, the extended Covid-19 pandemic sparked a revision of the traditional office space as people now largely work from home via internet technology. How can we rethink the use of internet technology in a way that combines the advantages of working from home with the ones of working at the office in order to create a new efficient working environment?

 Our group proposes an O.P.H.D. (O-Participatory Headquarters Decentralization) system to decentralize headquarters, make better use of city resources and enable creative work. It takes full advantage of the existing infrastructure of central London, the landscape, and the pedestrian system along the Thames to enrich work experience and strengthen company identity. Instead of the large headquarters, our group proposes an O.P.H.D. (O-Participatory Headquarters Decentralization) system to decentralise these functions, make better use of the existing city resources and enable the production of creative work. It takes full advantage of the existing infrastructure of central London, of the landscape and the pedestrian system along the Thames to both enrich the working experience and strengthen company identity. 

The cyber-physical gaming platform enhances the participation of the users in the design of the headquarters thus generating a better working experience and, at the same time, a sense of belonging. The employees can define and control the location of their office, the size and function of the overall space, as well as the organisation of the furniture and their personal space. The citizens can vote on the site of HQs and choose how they can occupy their ground floor; either with commercial programmes or leaving it entirely open. For the architect, macro-control of the HQs is achieved by creating a rich and interesting library of architectural geometries and suitable rules of the game. 

The user-preference learning and recommending system has enabled us to better collect and analyse information about our users. An improved algorithm based on Monte Carlo search trees can help users to make better choices in this dynamic gaming process, predicting what will happen in a few months' time, not just limited to the present. This will lead to a win-win participatory situation between citizens and companies, and between employers and employees. In order to solve the problems faced by large volume headquarters and to achieve a win-win situation for companies, citizens and employees, our proposal O.P.H.D will use user-preference learning, recommending system and cyber-physical game platform as a foundation. The aim is to involve more users in the design process and to complete the decentralization process of large companies.