5 Minutes With... Kenny Kinugasa-Tsui
Kenny Kinugasa-Tsui, Co-Founder of
Hong Kong studio Bean Buro, shares some insights from his book Co-Working Space Designs (Images Publishing, 2018).
“The current workplace design trends, in my opinion, have become overly generic, paradigmatic and rational. Through the creative explorations of our own projects, the book explores other ‘co-’ narratives that are poetic, artistic and romantic in the design of social spaces in a workplace.
“‘Co’ symbolises much more than just space sharing. A ‘co’ design should nurture community, connectivity, cohesiveness, collaboration. Each coworking environment should be unique to its own setting – its city context, the building and people. It should coherently respond to an overall ecology where user experience isn’t only considered inside the coworking space, but in response to the external dynamics of a place.
“We have previously seen coworking space designs that followed trends from Western cities, but the genre has evolved and expanded in Asian cities as the environment is very different. In densely populated Asian cities, coworking spaces are ‘parasitic’ spaces often situated in hybridised buildings with complex mixed-used functions. They form part of a complex ecology that is always pulsating with a fluctuation of needs affected by the economy and increasingly dynamic contemporary lifestyles.
“The coworking field is a powerful strand of development that will continually push the boundaries of design innovations, parallel to developments with technology. Designers are expanding the terminology of the ‘co’ in coworking.”