Who are Aéto and how do we work? Well, that’s always going to be work in progress.
Because every client is unique, and every assignment should be approached differently. So, in many ways our clients are making us up as we go along. Simply put, we’re business strategists helping organisations answer their toughest people + place questions.
Our work is always rooted in real-world observation and data. We passionately believe in the value of design, where the overarching purpose is well defined, the functional requirements are clear, and the form is then in service of the business objectives. We have created a number of novel tools and techniques to help clients navigate those questions.
We wouldn’t say we have a core service. We tend to be given complex, high‑impact assignments that help organisations design and align their workplaces and real estate strategies to employee needs and organisational objectives, using observed insights and operational data to shape workplace design, occupancy decisions and employee experience.
Almost anywhere we’re sent and for a diverse range of clients from education to finance, and technology to minerals and mining. We have worked with workplace experience data across global portfolios for one of the world’s biggest banks, to individual projects in New York, London, Dundee, Hyderabad and Sao Paulo.
We don’t hang around, and we don’t believe in wasting time, so expect us to want to get straight to the point and where needs be, be brutally honest. We’ll want the big picture mapped so we can also be detail oriented. And we see things others don’t because we’re wired curios, constantly looking way beyond workplace and real estate to find new approaches to problem solving.
Strategic futures
Few organisations have a clear North Star objective that defines the role of place in organisational performance. When asked to define the role of offices in the current landscape, executives struggle to provide a concise answer that resonates. Those who do inevitably stand apart, equipping those responsible for designing and operating spaces to deliver success.
We work with you to define why you have workplaces, how they need to work to brilliantly support the people who use them, and their role in organisational performance.
We challenge you to see the third horizon.
The result is a clearer understanding of trajectory, key milestones and a definition of success bound in a business brief confirming how goals will be measured and verified.
Design excellence
A new workplace design presents the opportunity to do things better. Employees’ needs are too often overlooked in the design process though, resulting in a downgrade in their experience. Work is more complex than ever, yet too many organisations let design overshadow function, failing to create spaces that truly support their people.
Our investigations identify key experience moments, representing the employee throughout the design process to inform space design and support generative AI-powered solutions.
Think of us as your “critical friend”.
We help organisations and design teams iterate proposals with both end-user needs and experience priorities front and centre.
Operational activation
Moments really matter in service design. Yet this services layer can often be the most difficult to design, the hardest to financially justify, the trickiest to procure and difficult to measure at the upper end of quality. But when companies get it right, you don’t just see it, you feel it.
We focus on the small but powerful details that shape experiences, as these seemingly minor elements have an outsized impact on experience.
We see the unseen and hear the unsaid.
Our tools and assessments reveal how spaces really work in practice and whether services deliver experiences that are memorable for the right reasons.
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