Time Warner - Hudson Yards

Designing for first impressions at Hudson Yards

Challenge

A new headquarters represents a rare opportunity for a company to realign its work environment with the way it wants to work - on day one, and for decades after. Time Warner is co-locating the New York offices of its divisions to a new state-of-the-art office tower in the Hudson Yards development on Manhattan. This new home will provide for the unique requirements of each division as well as become a platform of shared support and amenity space.

Our challenge was to develop a brand experience that celebrates the distinctiveness of the individual brands occupying the space, whilst ‘joining it all up’ to deliver the right impression for Time Warner as a parent brand.

Solution

Our team undertook a series of visits to the various Time Warner buildings and brands. For each visit we paid particular attention to the experience of arranging our visit, transit to the building and how we were treated on arrival. With so many brands and such broad cultures within Time Warner we focused the journey into distinct steps and created a visualisation of an amalgamated visitor journey that represented the best and worst of experiences for all the offices we had visited.

From here we defined a vision for the building: to help people feel connected to each other and part of something bigger—and that their part matters, and ensure the all aspects of the design of the building encourage people to connect by looking for ways to communicate more simply. We augmented this with a series of Experience Principles, designed to help subsequent design teams work to a set of common design coordinates as they build out the different components of the building.

My role

Pitch participant, project definition, experience direction.