GitHub is an open source coding community: one that prides itself in creating a transparent, connected, and collective product. Given their growing workforce, the company needed to expand, but faced constraints in their current brick and timber building, a space that opposed the attributes of the company in many ways. One goal for the expansion was to soften the harsh, masculine feel of the building, while providing a variety of settings for working at different times of the day.

The Rapt Studio approach begins with discovery, and in this project, we began with an extensive programming analysis. For GitHub, we enlisted a variety of qualitative research: focus groups, individual interviews, values and culture studies, and utilization surveys. This helped our design team to understand what was working in their previous space and – more importantly – what wasn’t. After synthesizing the findings, our solution strongly contrasted with the realities of their current space.

With minimal ceiling height and natural lighting only accessible on the eastern façade, the conditions are dark and constricting. To counter balance these conditions, a 1-foot thick backlit fabric wall is the dividing membrane, separating the closed program from the open office and creating a secondary source of light. This custom 3,000+sf translucent LED membrane becomes a wayfinding element that runs continuously throughout the office, serving as a beacon of light between the two work settings.