BBC

Strategy

Co-designing fit-out with users

Following the Director-General’s mandate that all BBC staff should have a say in defining their workspace, ZZA were commissioned to help the organisation achieve this in a meaningful way, given the BBC’s large scale, and the considerable professional expertise in BBC Property.

Working with the New Media department and their design team, we created a cost-effective toolkit that combined individual and team choice in designing team areas, with a degree of consistency that maintained control of specification and overall look and feel.

We then applied the approach with 17 BBC departments migrating to the BBC’s new build Media Centre in White City. This enabled teams to express fit-out preferences within a consistent spatial matrix in the Cat A interior. The process resulted in varied neighbourhoods, supporting the respective teams’ ways of working, and with lively expression of team identities that promoted legibility and a sense of belonging on the building’s large floor plates.

Evaluation

Post occupancy evaluations

Following occupancy of the BBC’s Media Village, BBC Property commissioned ZZA to undertake POEs of both the Broadcast and Media Centres. Responding to the client objectives to engage with the large user population and ZZA’s commitment to valid, useful data, we complemented structured face-to-face interviews with users representing the organisational and spatial spread across both buildings, with online input invited from all occupants of each building. The results highlighted instructive learning about the base buildings and their fit-outs, based on user preference and actual modes of use.

Harnessing the insights of ZZA’s UX:CAMPUS, the outputs fed into tuning the Media Village. Also leveraging deep learning of ZZA’s UX:WORKPLACE, the findings were input to successive BBC projects, including the interior fit-out of BBC Scotland’s building at Pacific Quay, for which ZZA had originally undertaken user research to shape the competition brief.

ZZA’s post occupancy evaluation of the Media Centre is described in the BCO Guide to Post Occupancy Evaluation.