The corporate world’s return to the office is in full swing. Employees across global companies like Amazon, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have been called back to the office five days a week. In early December, Instagram became the latest firm to announce a return-to-office mandate, with CEO Adam Mosseri justifying the move to boost employee “cooperation” and “creativity”.
Yet, many workers have dreaded the return to physical offices, and argued that hybrid work allows for flexibility without losing productivity. This presents a new post-pandemic challenge for workplace designers, who must now build attractive spaces to draw employees back to the office, said Ray Yuen, the office managing director at architectural firm Gensler.
“We’re no longer just designing workplaces, we’re actually designing experiences,” said Yuen, at the Fortune Brainstorm Design forum in Macau on Dec. 2. “You’ve really got to make the campus or the workplace more than work, and that’s the fun part of it.”
Citing results from a 2025 survey by his firm, Yuen said that when asked what makes for good workplaces, employees increasingly named factors such as food and wellness.
“They didn’t even mention anything about work—everybody just picked the stuff that we really want as human beings,” he added.
As such, workplace designers like Yuen need to think about how to reimagine modern offices. He pointed to a project Gensler worked on in Tokyo, Japan, for a company where 50% of its staff members had been working from home.
“We designed it [their office] with 15 different food offerings, including trying to bring Blue Bottle in. We ended up [also] designing a secret [vinyl] bar,” said Yuen.
Companies have also been seeking more transformable workspaces, Yuen added, and interior designers have responded by replacing built-in spaces with modular, removable furniture. “[This way,] you can transform a space when you need to, from an F&B [space] for the staff, to an events space or a happy hour space for your clients.”
The user needs for spaces are also becoming more complex, Yuen said. Airports, for instance, no longer serve as meagre transit hubs but are also places where travelers can work or rest.
Now, airports have “a lot more outdoor-indoor space [and] natural light, past the actual check-in area. Airport [experiences] used to be just you checking in, and sitting there, waiting,” the designer said. “It’s a destination, it’s no longer just a [place of] transit.”
As with other fields, artificial intelligence is also rewriting the playbook for designers.
Yuen recounted how some clients have pulled up visuals on AI image generators like Google’s Nano Banana Pro, before asking: “If they can do it in a second, why can’t design firms do it quicker?”
Many designers traditionally regard time and craftsmanship as core tenets of design, but AI is pushing them to change the way they work, Yuen said. Clients now want “immediate response, immediate gratification,” he continued.
“With AI, we’re now almost like a creator [of] all these art pieces, and we try to select what is suitable—that’s the only way we can manage that need from clients on speed and time,” said Yuen.
This story originally appeared on Fortune
