Introducing Our Latest Workplace Technology: Edge by Rhino

The workplace consultancy process has become integral to delivering great office design. Over the last 18-24 months, we’ve been quietly refining our own process to help us deliver better solutions for our clients. Sparked by a desire to move beyond the solutions that are already on the market, we wanted to see how we could do something innovative that stood out for clients.

Through hours of research and engagement with our clients and coupled with the rapid advancement of AI, we are now at the stage where we have integrated this new offering into our process. We are proud to announce this new service as Edge by Rhino.

At its core Edge by Rhino, or Edge as we refer to it in-house, is an AI powered workplace tool that captures insights from our clients and turns them into intelligent solutions. While on the surface it shares similarities with traditional workplace consultancy, the difference in the quality of information we can capture plus the speed of turnaround is, and has already been, a game-changer for our clients. Here is a quick introduction to Edge by Rhino and how it is helping us move design forward to provide better solutions to our clients.

Getting away from 50-page reports

One of the biggest shifts we’ve noticed since using Edge is that we no longer have to send long, formulaic reports to our clients. The information we can provide now via the digital dashboard only tells companies the things they need to know about the workplaces and their ways of working.

For years, workplace briefings have followed a familiar pattern rooted in surveys, workshops, interviews and manual data review that is compiled into a document after a few weeks. While the process itself is robust and reliable, time becomes a real factor when you are designing a scheme, or multiple schemes, for a potential client. So we’ve taken what we know works and removed the lengthy workshop cycles and 50+ page reports to deliver a more refined product.

Edge has been designed to offer clients a structured, intelligent survey that takes around 10–12 minutes to complete. Then rather than manually trawling through responses, the Edge AI processes qualitative and quantitative insight instantly. Now speed is undeniably helpful but the ability to build design recommendations that respond to individual sentiment is where it’s transformed the process for clients, and for us.

It is not only speed that has increased though. Another area that we have been able to develop is the ability to capture better quality answers and information.

Asking Better Questions

Traditional briefing often centres around outputs like ‘how many desks do you want?’ or ‘how many meeting rooms do you need?’ but with Edge, we can now get into the granular details of individual usage and feelings towards the office. So now we can understand how staff feel in their current workspace, what helps them perform and also the kinds of things that frustrate them. This leads to a whole new level of design capability.

These tiny shifts have helped us move away from designing to preconceived ideas of what a given space should be and focus more on designing around human performance. Edge collects data, not assumptions and we’ve seen how assumptions can be dangerous when designing workplaces. They’re not always wrong but it can be hard to get away from them if there is nothing to challenge them.

Of course we are still asking the important questions about whether a company should stay or go but we have got away from the standard questions that over simplify what people are asking for. On top of that the answers are now quickly analysed through Edge AI to provide a clean, definitive answer driven by data.

Embedded Into Our 4D Process

We’ve spent a lot of time integrating Edge into the way we do things at Rhino so it is fully embedded within our 4D process. It’s important to us that everything we learn from Edge feeds directly into concept development and future design decisions. The way we have developed a fully integrated process gives us confidence to design a solution that responds directly to the needs of our clients.

By merging Edge with our 4D process we also get to combine data with a human approach. The way we have developed our design team to interpret the output and findings enables us to offer something unique and insightful. Edge has become influential in how we design projects but it has also helped educate our clients in the process and show them how to encourage and support specific behaviours within the workplace.

Reshaping workplaces with data

We have seen how much work and the office itself has changed in recent years. With our expectations of what a workplace is changing so much, the way we capture data and ideas about our environments also has to move on.

There is more of a ‘lifestyle’ element to the workplace now than there ever has been in the past. With that shift comes more of a focus on experience and how the office feels to people as individuals and Edge allows us to capture those feelings more effectively. Naturally we can help companies save time and costs when designing their offices but primarily we can now develop better results that more accurately address their requirements.

coIf you’re planning a relocation or refurbishment or are curious to understand how your office actually works, get in touch to learn more about Edge.