EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub
Transforming the "innovation lab" from a passive showroom into an active factory.
Overview
Most corporate innovation labs are just fancy rooms for brainstorming. EY wanted something more daring. They partnered with Nottingham Spirk—the legendary "skunkworks" behind thousands of commercial patents—to create a facility where strategy and manufacturing collide. Our job was to design the interface for this collision. Located in a massive industrial center in Cleveland, the Hub allows C-suite executives to leave their boardrooms and step directly onto the factory floor, turning abstract business goals into tangible, testable prototypes in real-time.
Services
Experience Design, Interior Architecture
The Details
We designed the "Experience Zones" to be the bridge between thinking and making. Instead of static conference rooms, we built immersive workshops equipped with garage-door-sized video walls and augmented reality tools. Here, clients don't just look at case studies; they roll up their sleeves to co-create with engineers. The space is wired for speed, allowing teams to sketch a concept on a digital canvas in the morning and hold a 3D-printed model of it by the afternoon. It is a machine for pragmatism, designed to kill the inertia that usually dooms corporate innovation.
