Nikola Corporation

The challenge

Nikola was building a 180,000 square foot headquarters and prototype production facility in Phoenix. The furniture plan was not in the architect’s scope — a decision the facility manager made deliberately, because he wanted a firm whose expertise was specifically ergonomics and general office furniture, not a line item inside someone else’s drawing set.

The company was also building zero-emission vehicles. A supplier who treated sustainability as an afterthought would have been a poor fit.

The solution

Applied Ergonomics worked with Nikola on spec for a year while the plan developed — through multiple iterations and last-minute changes — and did all of the interior design and product selection for the building.

The work was done largely long-distance, from Chicago to Phoenix. It was not an issue.

The result

Nikola grew from the initial 200 employees to more than 1,100 in the building Applied Ergonomics furnished. One small expansion phase went to a highly rated local dealer; Nikola came back.

That is the test this project actually passed — not how it looked on opening day, but whether the plan absorbed five and a half times the headcount it was drawn for.

The boardroom

The boardroom sits under a field of blue acoustic baffles, in a room glazed on two sides. Seating is a Via Vero highback at the table with Keilhauer Cahoots on the perimeter, around a custom Okamura Traverse table built to the room’s dimensions rather than to a catalog length.

Custom was the right answer here for the same reason it usually is: the room was a particular size, and a standard table would have meant designing the meeting around the furniture.

Ergonomics at every desk

Every workstation is height-adjustable, with monitor arms carrying the displays off the surface. It is the least visible part of the project and the part that most affects the people who work there — which is why the furniture plan belonged with a firm that thinks about it first rather than last.

Departments were designed around individually. An engineer running three monitors and a salesperson on the phone all day do not need the same desk.

Places to meet that are not meeting rooms

Interiors that carry the brand

The building shows its own product. The interior was designed so the vehicles read as part of the workplace rather than as a showroom bolted onto it — wood, pattern film and the company blue carried through from the display floor into the offices.

Scope: all interior design and product selection for the building

Specified on this project