Designers love to design for designers. Capital One Labs in San Francisco is a division of the corporate giant responsible for creating financial service apps and other interactive products for customers—basically a design studio tucked into a bank.
Designers love to design for designers. Capital One Labs in San Francisco is a division of the corporate giant responsible for creating financial service apps and other interactive products for customers—basically a design studio tucked into a bank.
City San Francisco, CA
Year 2013
Size 3,500 sq ft
Team Denise Cherry, Clem Soga, Chris Lindes, Oren Aks, Alma Lopez, Kroeun Dav, Alfred Socias, Justin Ackerman, Sarah Dziuba, Chase Lunt, Jeorge Jordan, Elizabeth Guerrero, Holly Hursley
Photographer Jasper Sanidad
With a former lecturer from Stanford’s d.school as director, Capital One brought an unusual level of rigor to the design development process. Evelyn Huang’s team often met O+A’s proposed solutions with the question: “What are two other ways that we could accomplish that?”
O+A’s goal was to create a space that would shake up thinking patterns. This studio is a hub of prototyping and visualization and as such a zone for questioning everything, considering everything. The space reflects that fluidity: furniture movable, walls movable, acoustics variable, all aspects of the space subject to change.
“I love the space. It makes me happy to come to work every day.”
“I think it’s true that people need nooks,” Evelyn Huang says. “And that’s regardless of where on the spectrum of introversion to extroversion you are. I think actually creating spaces for that to happen can be beneficial.” Everything about the finished Capital One Labs speaks to this impulse to work in nooks.
