IBM has a red London phone box in its office.
It’s unclear whether it functions, or indeed if anybody at IBM has even had to use a phone box in the last decade. But that does not stop the IBM marketing bods stopping the tour and pretending to be ashamed that they know it is a Mk. 6 edition, as opposed to the awfully vulgar Mk. 2 that lesser IT firms are presumably touting.
We are not in Shoreditch, they point out, which is a welcome assurance given the dress code and offensively coloured sofas (so arranged as to create an "ad hoc meeting environment"). One assumes that like the House of Commons there are also not enough seats for all employees, a Churchillian wheeze since rebranded "hot desking" by whoever comes up with these absurd terms.
Also on show is an alarming pride in the use of post-it notes. "I think one team is going for a Guinness world record of how many you can get in one place," beams our host, unaware he may be promoting a viable alternative to the interactive white boards they were touting a few minutes ago.
Had anyone missed the point Karel Vredenburg, director of IBM Design, happily rams it home: "Even as large as we are, we still work like a start-up." Nobody interjects that most start-ups would probably have installed a falafel shop somewhere in the building, which from the outside is still as hideous as the word "1980s" would imply.
All this is supposed to be the result of Ginni Rometty, IBM’s chief executive for more than three years. As Vredenburg continues, his company quickly realised they needed a shedload of designers to fulfil her vision, and have since been scouring the world’s design schools to poach the best talent.
Yet he adds that the firm found itself unsatisfied with such institutions and had to create what it describes as "the missing semester of design school", an attempt to carve graduates into willing workers of Big Blue.
Perhaps to let the creative juices flow one needs such conformism, as well as the obligatory table tennis tables, modernist settees and tweed jackets. At least it should lure the Shoreditchers from north of the river.
