Open for business in Aarhus and Oslo
We’ve been thinking about the future of working practices. What is it like to share space, build community, bounce ideas off of co-workers and share resources? Two of our studios in the Nordics — Aarhus and Oslo — have opened up co-working spaces. This experiment has combined startups, freelancers, and entrepreneurial events under the same roof — and under the Designit umbrella. We tracked down Mikkel Mol Dalsgaard, Head of Designit OPEN to walk us through it…
Co-working spaces, the Designit way
Matters: Mikkel, in one sentence what is Designit OPEN?
Mikkel: The short story is that it’s a professional co-creation space for startups, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.
Matters: What do the startups, freelancers, and entrepreneurs come to the space for?
Mikkel: They come here for the community vibe and the professional sparring. You have a lot of like-minded individuals working at a very high-level. Everyone benefits from having a lot of different skillsets available right there. Also, from a co-working perspective, one of the other benefits is that you’re situated right next to Designit — and we’re a large global player. They’re therefore next to a lot of business and interfacing with interesting clients who are coming through the house. So, they benefit from Designit, but on the flip side, Designit benefits from fresh thinking, bright minds, different ideas, excellent freelancers, and an entrepreneurial mindset. All available right next to the coffee machine.
Matters: How does Designit OPEN differ from Designit itself?
Mikkel: Designit OPEN differs because it’s a co-working space. A space where we let other companies, other individuals through the door to share our daily practices and our daily routines. So, instead of being separate, they become part of our daily lives. Actually, using the Aarhus studio as an example, we have turned it into one big co-working space where Designit is the biggest player (obviously) because the location is ours. However, we share all the common areas and facilities like the canteen and meeting rooms. Through OPEN, we interact with a lot of different businesses and have a lot of different touchpoints with new businesses, which as you can imagine, is a great asset.
Matters: What does a space like this help us with?
Mikkel: Well, it’s a place that allows us to experiment with how we work, how we arrange our studio spaces. and how we arrange our ways of working. If you’re looking at it from a broader perspective, there is this headline of Future of Work or New Ways of Working. A lot of companies are looking into how to be fit for the future, and we can arrange our own business and studio space to accommodate that. So, this co-working space allows us to experiment in a lot of places to figure out how to stay relevant, stay innovative, and expand our network. It helps us address the fact that a lot of people are going freelance these days. That’s an increasing trend. We can see people starting their own businesses — Designits too — so how can we invite them back in? People are luckily wanting to work with us and to become a part of the amazing Designit culture that we have.
Matters: What are the ambitions for the space?
Mikkel: The first thing we had to do was prove that it could work. We’ve done that. Now we understand that we’re generating new business through OPEN in Aarhus. We get a lot of resources from the space and we also use it as a recruitment platform — which is important. That’s working and we want to benefit even more from it — to become better at profiting from the co-working space, on the business side, but also on the human side.
We want to expand that beyond Aarhus. We have the OPEN space in Oslo, and then we’re going to look into how we can expand internally across our organization. In a broader sense, we want to see how OPEN as a concept — maybe not only as a co-working space where you have available square meters, but also as a concept of community, innovation, and sharing — can be tapped into by other Designit studios as well. It will be interesting to see how what we learn from doing this will be relevant for our clients. We have some interesting dialogues now with big clients who are interested in how they can transform their own studio spaces and facilities into what we’re doing here. So, we’re also inspiring others.
Matters: What have you learned?
Mikkel: That sharing and openness really do matter. That we shouldn’t close our doors and be isolated as Designit only. To me personally, I talk to a lot of people on a daily basis — not only from Designit — because I run the space. It is honestly enriching my daily life. I get so much input from people struggling to keep their own business going, or succeeding in keeping their own business going. Learning from their experiences and knowing how to adapt are what we do at Designit.
Have something to share? Reach out to Mikkel at mikkel.mol@designit.com for any questions and queries!
