Fintech Office / WIT Design & Research
Fintech Office / WIT Design & Research
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The birth of a design-driven office space brand. The end of 2020. A Fintech investor called Luo, founder of WIT: “I have decided to invest in Fintech”. Let’s work together again, before the year is over. ” For WIT, the invitation not only marked progress from designing for the underground space to designing for standard office space above ground, but was also an opportunity to explore how to make conventional office space unconventional, and to increase Fintech’s brand awareness.
May 2020. Fintech Ⅱ started designing. Fintech was launched at almost 20% higher cost per square meter, which meant that WIT was “free to install terrazzo tiles on the floor”. At this time, however, the pandemic came over the office market and the authorities asked for telework. In October 2020, during the first week after completion, a database company leased the triangular room to Fintech Ⅱ, which before renovation had been in a miserable condition. However, another AI company was not so lucky – when it failed to secure the rental of the space, it asked the developer to ensure that WIT could design another office space of the same quality in the building. According to the son of the company’s investor who had returned from the US, the office is “even more comfortable than at home”.
February 2020. The Fintech office and Dragon Restaurant, located in and developed by the Ronghui International Building, were simultaneously put into operation. The Ronghui International Building, an office building dedicated to serving the financial technology industry, had received strong support from the Beijing government, but like many other businesses in Beijing, including those in the CBD, it felt a bit of a pandemic. It was during these challenging times that the Fintech Office debuted. Several days later, a former AI researcher at Google, who had decided to start his own business and received funding from Google and Volkswagen, rented the entire space of the Fintech Office, which was originally intended to be a collaboration room. He made the decision the moment he walked into the lobby, despite the fact that the rent was almost as high as for a building in the CBD. Considering that the limited height of -1F had once hindered the rental business of the building, the agreement was a victory for both the developer and WIT, who had undertaken the design for -1F and -2F.
After Fintech Ⅲ had been held for the use of the investor himself for a year, more and more potential tenants came to visit the place and tried to negotiate the rent of the place. The competitive price eventually attracted the developer to rent out the space. Meanwhile, the Fintech Office began receiving invitations to collaborate, including from the operator of an existing building of over one hundred thousand square meters that wanted to use its brand, design and administration service. Over the past two years, the Fintech Office has thrived in the midst of the pandemic. The office space and Dragon Restaurant, funded by the developer of the building and designed by WIT Design & Research, have offered “an ideal dining experience and” a one minute living circle “to stressed professionals in the Fintech industry who are in search of peace of mind, and they act as an example of an office community that breaks the spell of the downturn in the rental industry.This is how the brand Fintech Office, along with Dragon Restaurant, which offers the best dining environment of all the other restaurants in the chain across China, was born.WIT suggested that the design of it The lowered atrium was included in the contract, and the indoor / outdoor landscape also expands the physical / psychological office space available to employees and allows them to embrace city life.
Technology follows hospitality. The staircase is designed with parametric software instead of being designed by hand to highlight the characteristics of the financial technology industry. Despite the extremely low cost, the “design” solves problems, creates value, and most importantly, looks glamorous.
Priority given to efficiency over capacity. Challenged by the limited space, WIT believes that “it is normal to have an imperfect space, and that is where designers can maneuver to make the most of it”. The developer and the designers are responsible for guaranteeing a satisfactory number of sales per unit area, but the extent to which the functionality and friendliness of the space can be delivered by the design will eventually be noticed by the people who are users of the space. , and that is WIT’s priority. During the design process, we asked ourselves: What is the efficiency when we talk about office space?
When it comes to working in modern times, working from home is still a controversial topic. Technology is useful, but not a panacea: unable to facilitate sincere conversations and trust building as face-to-face communication does. This is especially the case when employees in the high-tech industry work under enormous pressure and require a lot of coordination – they will in the foreseeable future need a physical space to cooperate.
The discussion about work efficiency continues between the investor and Luo, who built the Fintech Office brand together, inspired by the birth of the efficiency-oriented design of groups of semicircle desks in Bloomberg London.
