Kai McKinney

Industrial Design, 2021

2020 was the biggest experiment in remote work - and it’s here to stay. Workers are staying productive and enjoying flexible lifestyles but are also experiencing work/life blur. And since workers aren’t returning to offices, city centers and commercial spaces are starting to suffer.

Workaround is a system for setting up pop-up coworking in vacant spaces, making it easy to work from anywhere. The Workaround app makes it easy to discover new places to work - users vote on new locations and realtors provide vacant spaces. When a match is made, we deploy the Workaround Grid to quickly transform a vacant space into a fully-equipped workspace.

The Workaround Grid helps maintain control of the most important parts of a workspace - the lighting, acoustics, layout, wi-fi, and power. It transforms empty spaces into deliberate and effective workplaces. And the Grid itself is strong, lightweight, and modular - it ships folded and flatpacked, ready to be assembled in mere hours.

Kai McKinney is a generalist with a bent toward systems thinking, innovation, and business. He approaches the design process with lateral thinking and a multidisciplinary approach, and is drawn to opportunities within sustainability, mobility, productivity, and the future of work. Outside the studio, Kai is the co-founder of Helm, a software startup, and Can’t Stop Columbus, a community volunteer initiative. He also leads student innovation at Ohio State with the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship and Stanford University.

See his other work at here