Field Notes: Space Planning for a Coworking Expansion
By Leslie Schneider
Quick Test Fits Provide Data for Scenarios Development
As the co-owner of a small coworking space near Seattle, we are constantly shifting the layout and locations of desks as well as eyeing other space in the building that we might be able to expand into. In addition to coworking, the building we are in hosts four restaurants and some movie theaters as well as a few other office and retail spaces. We’ve called this building our business home for almost 10 years now, since 2011. A year ago we had to shut our doors for about 6 weeks due to Covid, and we have been under various restrictions since then.
1. This floor plan was imported as an iPhone photo via the Genius Scan app.
2. In FacilityQuest we drew the green line (upper right, in the “Event” room) because we knew that dimension and therefore could use that line to set the scale for the entire plan.
3. Eight purple rectangles covered the full existing OfficeXpats Coworking space. We tagged them as “Main” and got a quick square foot total area.
A new urgency is emerging from requests and questions about the availability of private offices in our space. We’ve had the goal to provide enclosed offices for a few years, but never pulled the trigger on a new commitment; the few rooms that we had we preferred to offer as reservable meeting rooms. Now it seems vital. For health, as well as business. Even in a post-pandemic world.
Private offices in a coworking space have special requirements to justify their higher cost compared to any locked door space in a commercial building. Coworking is about community and shared resources. Someone who rents space in coworking wants visibility into liveliness. Connected to activity. Not just a locked door in a blank wall.
When my partner and I embarked on creating a proposal to our landlord, we had a number of hurdles.
A small problem was that we had access to some floor plans, but how to digitize them easily without a large scale scanner?
Then, how to graphically overlay on the outdated floor plans our ideas for various scenarios for space planning, knowing that those ideas would probably be modified with counter proposals from the landlord? Many graphics programs would offer general layering, but could we easily manage the scale of the markup?
And then there was the problem of turning drawings on a map into a business plan and an offer for new leased space. We needed to know how much space as square feet we were getting ourselves into. It was not obvious from a floor plan that only had a few inside wall dimensions.
We had a secret weapon. I also work for a company called FacilityQuest. For a little longer than I’ve been nurturing my coworking space, FacilityQuest has been in the business of “large scale space utilization data gathering.” Architecture companies would use our software-as-a-service to perform one or two-week observation studies on hundreds of spaces for clients anticipating big decisions.
But I knew that FacilityQuest would also be perfect for my very different data-gathering-idea-generating-decision-making space management task. I could import a floor plan and overlay rectangular markup that could define areas. Those rectangles had a superpower: I could set the scale on the floor plan, and then any rectangle would also know how many square feet it represented. And I could link these areas by tags, such as “enclosed-office,” to immediately see the sum of all related areas.
But first, how to import that awkward, oversized floor plan? It was only 11x17, but too big for the many normal-page-size scanners that I had access to. So I took a photo of it with my phone using the app Genius Scan to automatically optimize the contrast and clean up stuff like shadows. After uploading it into FacilityQuest you would have to look closely to see a tiny hint of the fold line.
Then I played with drawing new enclosed offices, calibrating the rectangles to the scale of the floor plan, adding tags, and seeing the cumulative area. We repeatedly changed dimensions of the offices to try out different test fit options. We printed these sketches for tenant improvements and showed them to the landlord.
And then of course, the landlord had a different long-term goal for the space we proposed, so our tenant improvements for that space would have to wait for a comprehensive re-design. We went back to the drawing board, um, I mean the floor plan. Round 2, we focused on acquiring existing enclosed offices that did not require tenant improvements as an interim plan.
The story on negotiations is still not over, but we now have a flexible system for creating new scenarios. The underlying intelligence of those scenarios is understanding the exact relationship between the cost of supply (our cost per square foot of usable space plus triple net plus added percent of common space) and the price we can charge for the demand (membership fees for dedicated offices with specific sizes).
On top of all that, FacilityQuest has long offered us the ability to organize data about our spaces by dropping blue-dot pins on the floor plans. Like the tags on markup areas, data associated with those blue dots gets summarized, so we know how many dedicated desks and unassigned desks we have, and can track data associated with our meeting rooms.
FacilityQuest is looking for pilot projects that expand the horizons of use for FacilityQuest. If you would like to work with us on this or other uses, we encourage you to apply. Here is an article that offers more information.