A description of the Boston office of design firm Continuum - not to be confused with the IT management company that holds the same name and was acquired in June - cannot miss two keywords: white and bright.
The company, which is known for designing Target’s iconic red shopping cart, moved to a new space near the Boston Design Center in 2016, after being located in West Newton for 20 years. “It was hard to attract talent there,” Lee Moreau, principal at Continuum, said in an interview. Among other reasons for moving there, he added, there was the desire to be “part of the conversation” in the city and have all the people working on the same floor.
Located at 21 Drydock, the 52,000-square-foot space is home to 125 employees and it’s composed of three different areas. The first one is the Green Zone, where employees meet for company meetings or workshops. The kitchen, which is equipped with a banquet-style table, is also here - on the right side of the entrance.
The other two areas are the Made Real Lab, where engineers use three 3-D printers to make the physical prototypes for each design project, and the Living Room, where employees meet with the clients to discuss each step of the design process. These areas are not open to the public, therefore I was not allowed to visit them. An access badge required to pass from one area to another.
However, rooms across the three areas are named according to the same concept. Specifically, rooms facing the airport are named after innovative aircraft, either real or imaginary, and rooms facing the cruise ship are named after innovative ships. As a result, meetings can be held in rooms such as Voyager (the space probes launched by NASA) or Nautilus (Captain Nemo’s fictional submarine).
“It was a way to orient people,” Moreau said.
For this photo reportage, I took photos of the Green Zone and included photos of the other two areas that were provided by Continuum.
