JAPAN'S BEST-DESIGNED OFFICESConcept
A circle, and a room full of telephones
Two things on this floor are worth the trip. The first is the reception: a circular counter with planting growing up through the middle of it, lit from above, so that the first thing a visitor meets is a shape rather than a desk.
The second is a room the company calls the verification area, kept permanently stocked with current devices so that software can be checked on each of them. It is the least decorative space in the building and the most revealing: a company that tests on real hardware keeps a room for the hardware, and that room has to be somewhere people will actually walk to. PLAY put it on the working floor, along with the equipment store, the vending machines and the snacks, in an area it calls X.
01 · The entrance and the floor
Open, and undivided
The fifteenth-floor reception opens directly onto the working floor, which is laid out as open desks with nothing standing between them.
02 · Rooms for talking
From two people to forty
Meeting rooms of several sizes are spread across the two floors. Where a room is more than a conversation needs, enclosed single boxes handle online meetings and calls. At the other end, the seminar room takes more than forty people.
03 · The X area
Everything, in the middle
The company gathered its equipment and its test devices into one area at the centre of the floor rather than distributing them, and then put the vending machines and the snacks in the same place. The result is a room people pass through for two unrelated reasons, which is usually how an office ends up with conversations in it.
04 · Coffee, and shoes off
What the floor keeps for rest
A café on the fifteenth floor is staffed by a barista. The rest rooms — on both floors, separated by gender — are shoes-off, with bean bags on the floor and massage chairs in them.
05 · Fukuoka
The same idea, smaller
The Fukuoka office repeats the arrangement at a smaller scale: an entrance with the company mark, meeting rooms, booths, an open working room, a counter area along the glass with the city behind it, and a free space.
