Back in 2015

We saw an opportunity to capture a growing market for ancillary products and applications: lounges, dining areas, and other in-between settings that facilitated social interaction, and therefore, stronger company culture. To set this collection apart, we launched Studio TK—with a brand and portfolio built around the concept of “social spaces” and their way of enabling choice, connection, and community in service of company culture.

Over the last 10 years

Much has changed. The industry is more competitive, the office is less populated, and social spaces no longer sit at the center of company culture. As the lines between “work spaces” and “home spaces” have blurred, so have the lines between the different ways we use them.  To keep their employees engaged, organizations have tried various solutions: virtual collaboration, in-person connection, hybrid. Yet in absence of personal investment, any mandate has had people feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and uninspired.

BECAUSE WHEN IT COMES TO THE WAY THAT PEOPLE WORK, NO ONE SIZE FITS ALL.

More than ever

We all want the space to choose, with the tools to do our best work, the opportunities to connect—with ourselves, with each other, with a greater purpose—and the chance to change our minds, from one moment to the next.

At Studio TK

We’d been trying for years to fit more and more employees into the same traditional office space—many of us with the same desks and chairs assigned to us when we started with an organization. But over the last year, we’ve been experimenting. We turned our underutilized showroom space into a free-flowing workspace—no assigned seats, no fixed furniture, just lots of electrical.

WE FOUND THAT OUR NEEDS ARE NOT ONLY DIFFERENT, THEY CHANGE FROM DAY TO DAY.

On some days, some of us needed to hunker down with guaranteed monitors for heavy heads-down work, and to be mobile for meetings and emails on others.

Areas with sofas and 26”H tables became more popular because we could have the best of both worlds—seated comfortably, with access to a table—much like how we might work at home. 29”H traditional work tables were best-paired with a variety of chair heights and styles, that were suited to different body types and comfort levels.

Smaller tables became mobile accessories to hooded nooks, so people could hide themselves away with their phones or coffees nearby. People moved constantly—round the space, from ready-made work stations to make-shift personal stations, to be heads-down or to chat with a colleague.

WE FACED SOME CHALLENGES. AND WE MADE MANY CHANGES.

01
The Philosopher

Aristotle once wrote that a human is “by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” Even 2,000 years ago, long before the dawn of modern science, the father of western philosophy could see that our social character was inseparable from our identity and our connection to society.

02
The Anthropologist

Of all the species in the animal kingdom, humans possess the largest brains relative to body size. Group that with the fact that a species’ brain size directly correlates to the size of its social group and you can conclude that our large brains evolved to prioritize human interaction. Using primate brain size as a benchmark, anthropologist Robin Dunbar was able to extrapolate the maximum number of social connections a human could maintain. The number? 150. Interestingly enough, in his book, The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell recounts the story of Gore-Tex, whose management structure requires they build a new office anytime their headcount gets too high. The number? 150. 

03
The Neuroscientist

Matthew Lieberman, a neuroscientist from UCLA and author of Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, makes the case that being socially connected is not just an artifact of millions of years of evolution, but essential to our survival. “In a sense, evolution has made bets at each step that the best way to make us more successful is to make us more social.” His research has shown that even at rest, the brain defaults to a social state; years of evolution have trained resting brains to be best prepared to reactivate within a social context.