From the course: Creative Inspirations: Dale Herigstad & Schematic, Interactive Design Agency

Workspace

Dale Herigstad: So welcome to Schematic. We are in Los Angeles. I want to take you on a little walk around the studio, a unique space designed by an architect, well-known architect Eric Moss here in Culver City. This is sort of the main entrance to the building, a little bit unique. When you are here, it's from the elevator or going other directions, you can actually from here pivot and enter to different parts of the disciplines that are here, the administration, production and design, straight ahead of you, and also to user experience and technology, which are other parts of this company. This now is our design and creative space. As you can see it's a hubbub of activity here. And what we are trying to do, again, is remember that theme of openness that you will see in the rest of this building. We have a lot of meeting spaces. The meeting spaces and all the offices are all fishbowls. We really like the fact that as we are working, we actually are not hiding anything. It's a very open environment here. A lot of our surfaces, the wall surfaces are already white-board ready. So we just draw on walls, we draw on glass, we draw on anything. Well, not anything. The main open area are these kind of triad of like three workstations together. Look we have a little mini meeting going on here right now, but again you can see why this is nice. You can see that the activity is going on and you sense again the activity because of these glass offices. This is our user experience group. The interesting thing I think about what we have done at Schematic with user experience is that we -- even though some of these folks sit on this side over here and the creative department is in another spot, we work together a lot and the whole production process is really putting those two disciplines together as a single effort. This is a good example of what we were talking about earlier, because Trevor is user experience, user experience team, and Paul is from our design team. So these guys are collaborating together on a project. Paul: It's constant back and forth teamwork. We are constantly checking in with each other, making sure we are on the same page. Dale Herigstad: This collaboration is really important to getting the work done, right? Paul: All the time. Dale Herigstad: One of the things that's great about the company is that we really stress that we are human beings here and we need to have fun and get along with each other. It's another mini-meeting here. See this is the way things get done. Male Speaker: It's the only way things get done. Dale: You have got two producers, right? Male Speaker: But you see today I have got my running shoes because I know I am going to go around a lot. Dale Herigstad: That's right. Nobody stays put. Male Speaker: Exactly, exactly. Dale Herigstad: So now we are going to step into the technology area. These are the guys that keep us running in here, keep our iPhones running, keep our Macs running, and our Blackberries. This one particularly shows what Eric Moss does a lot, which is you have got some remnants of the old kind of warehouse spaces. So you see these wooden beams that they are kind of restructured and kind of -- fabricated somehow and modernized. It kind of blends the original with new, which is very nice. This is kind of a hub of production up here. So our head of production is up here. So people are meeting together to figure out strategies, new process for the new projects. We're now going to the roof of the building. So this is sort of the end of the tour of this particular Los Angeles facility. The origin of the company was really here in Los Angeles in the heart of the entertainment business. We have other offices, in fact a number of them, New York, Atlanta. We have offices also in Minneapolis, Austin, San Francisco, and then I am leading now our newest office, which is in London which services Europe. So you are seeing kind of the expansion of Schematic sort of into the rest of the world. It's created some very interesting challenges in connecting us together. But we are one big family here of creative technology and user experience in the new digital age.

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