The inspiration for Mother's London work space was born of start-up necessity but has grown to define the company's operating philosophy. The nearly 12-year-old agency began around a table in partner Robert Saville's house, where he would cook up a spaghetti Bolognese while the founders worked late into the night alongside strategists, creatives, sometimes even clients. Before collaboration became the business buzzword it is today, Mother's partners understood that by simply rubbing shoulders they were able to produce better ideas quicker.
Today that kitchen table has grown to 250 feet long, an appropriate metaphor for Mother's extended family of 135 staffers who work in the Biscuit Building, a converted warehouse. The seating arrangements around the massive concrete surface -- which can accommodate 200 people -- are changed monthly, and agency partners are shuffled into the mix of creatives, strategists, finance and administrative employees determined by the office manager. Staffers' ties to their workspace are a storage trolley, laptop locker and cordless phone.
"It forges a culture of openness," explains partner Matthew Clarke. "We're constantly moving on; there's no time to form cliques and departmentalized bonding. It keeps things really fresh. You might have a senior creative person asking for a suggestion about music and a billings clerk gives him the suggestion he ends up using. Everyone is involved in the creative process."
Mother's unusual approach to its work space is as much cultural screening as it is philosophical statement: Job applicants are shown the work space as part of their interview process.
Mother turned to Southern California's Clive Wilkinson Architects in 2004 to find a way to preserve and enlarge its worktable -- a once-quaint idea that nonetheless continues to convey the iconoclastic personality of what has grown to become one of the U.K.'s most influential agencies. The fiftysomething Wilkinson, a South African by way of London, may have first made his name in the states through his work for TBWA\Chiat\Day, but his award-winning portfolio of projects has since grown to include interiors like Google's 500,000-square-foot Silicon Valley campus. Ad agencies, however, continue to capture Wilkinson's imagination, both for their vibrant, eclectic work cultures and their reflection of, and influence on, pop culture. CWA's industry projects have also included FCB in Irvine, Calif., and JWT in New York.
"What was a surprise to me was to realize that advertising agencies have applied more creative thinking to the workplace than architects have," he observes. "I always thought architects knew how to design space, but ad agencies are actually so much better at it. They have to constantly be reinventing because they live and die by creativity. A lot of architectural firms -- especially the biggest ones -- all have a relatively boring product, in my view. They are mostly valued by their clients for delivery and predictability. In advertising, that's absolutely not the case: Predictability is not going to get you anywhere."
Ad agencies, with their creative focus and unconventional corporate cultures, offer a fertile laboratory to explore cutting-edge change in the workplace. Office design is rife with trendy jargon, but beyond debate is the fact that the environments both epitomize and enable new ways of working. Assembly-line cubicles and closed-door offices have decreasing relevance in a workplace changed by mobile technology and new business priorities that demand greater collaboration.
"It used to be that 90-95 percent of America was based in the service economy that was modeled upon an organizational pattern formed in the last industrial age and based on how people thought about factories and how people were productive in a factory-like way," Wilkinson says. "We've come into a new knowledge economy, a new-idea economy that's definitely moved away from routine drudge work. That means people spend a lot of time in meetings and in collaboration, so when they do concentrate at work they don't need to be around people. The more mobile our tools become, like with laptops, where you can take your work home easily, the more people will be doing their concentrated work away from the office and their collaborative work in the office."
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