Activating buildings into places of belonging

Their Challenge

Today’s commercial buildings aren’t always the easiest places to navigate for those new to their workplace. Without the right ecosystem, it can be isolating for new occupiers, generally corporate professionals, to navigate it on their own and feel like they belong. But this isn’t a surprise, as their building managers aren’t always equipped to help.

The Core Vision team worked with us to engage these occupiers, understand the strengths and realities of life as people who work in separate silos, and ultimately create and prototype a new vision for meaningful tenant experiences.

Our Strategy

In partnership with Diversus, a business and technology consultancy, we designed a web app to help bring occupiers closer together. Along the way, the DrawHistory team also took the lead on building a brand strategy, positioning myLocus as more than an information portal, but a tool for community activation where people can feel like they belong.

More importantly, this culminated in the development of a powerfully flexible brand, where the identity’s visual system is able to continuously change forms, depending on which commercial building is deploying the portal.

Cultural insights from the property sector

We initially conducted a series of four workshops with the myLocus team, allocating them into identified areas of pain points for tenants. The areas ranged from work isolation, limited social time, and token offers for events and memberships.

After conducting interviews and observations with fellow colleagues, we expanded our survey to others who work at some of the largest buildings in the city across diverse sectors.

Many of them suggested that a portal was only as useful as its ability to connect people. They had used OEPs in the past, but were overwhelmed with spam, received irrelevant content and became sceptical of their value.

Distilling our research

To distil our learnings, we started by making our data tangible, printing out notes, photos and screenshots. Then we identified all the people and products that make up the ecosystem of tenants, building managers and building owners, and jotted down the unmet needs and hidden assets of each persona involved.

We presented findings to a room of stakeholders, and led the group in a brainstorm to generate new ideas that would create a more community and connection-centred portal. We quickly turned those ideas into visual prototypes, and brought them back to the Core Vision team for feedback and iteration.

A living brand

Over the course of 14 weeks, we not only designed a user interface and experience that mirrored our research but created a brand based on a concept around people’s need to belong in a community.

This dynamic personalisation ultimately became the vehicle for the myLocus identity. We concluded that people needed a tool they can see as their own for it to truly be adopted. Accordingly, for every new building the myLocus portal is deployed in, its visual system would be formed around their surrounding neighborhoods.

Community Outcome

An important goal for the project was to foster deeper understanding among OEP service providers who help create these corporate environments become more liveable.

When the industry is not aligned, they can unintentionally cause burnouts among professionals, but when it genuinely wants to build more conducive communities, it can support corporate environments much better.

Our work built empathy among stakeholders on how we can more meaningfully integrate well-being into the workplace, endorsed by the many buildings who have now taken on the portal as their go-to community portal. myLocus is now being rolled out to large commercial buildings around the world.