Scott Harmon is the CEO of Swivel, a digital leasing platform for offices. Founded in 2019, Swivel’s basic technology creates three-dimensional renditions—Harmon calls them digital twins—of spaces that building owners and agents use to provide virtual tours of properties. In May, the company launched another product, Swivel Space Planning, that offers office design capabilities. Harmon recently spoke with us about this new tool, the advantages it offers design pros and clients, and why it’s especially relevant for post-pandemic offices.
Troy Segal (TS): How’d you come up with the idea for Swivel Space Planning?
Scott Harmon (SH): It was one of our customers who leases office buildings. He said, “Once somebody decides to actually lease an office, they have to go through this entire process to design that office. I have PTSD over doing those test fits. They cost a lot of money, they take weeks and weeks, you have to send hundreds of drawings back and forth in email. Could we use your technology to do that—adapt it to help me directly design online the space they want?”
TS: So you’re using Swivel to actually create an office, not just tour a space?
SH: That’s exactly right—it’s a direct evolution of our core digital twin technology. Our platform allows tenants to really see the designs that they would be getting, rather than looking at spreadsheets and all these other things that can be very confusing. We call it “social design.” It’s a new way for designers and people who sell those things to socialize and interact with clients almost in real time and let them buy directly right from their desktop.
TS: Who’s the target audience?
SH: We have two primary constituents: landlords and their leasing agents, and design professionals. Soon we plan to make it available to furniture companies, too.
TS: There’s a lot of interactive imaging out there now. What is Swivel Space Planning providing that other design software is not?
SH: Using AI, we can create almost overnight these 3D models of your exact office. It’s a replica of your space, not some generic office somewhere—a virtual world that looks like a finished place. Clients can walk around it and go, “Aha, I really like this furniture, I really like this design.” That helps them decide to spend money. So everybody wins, the design firms, the landlord, and the furniture company.
TS: Could you walk me through the experience?
SH: It’s kind of a three-step process. Let’s say you’re a design professional and you have a client that’s considering leasing an office in the middle of Manhattan. You would log into your Swivel account, and say, “I want to order a digital twin for 640 Madison Avenue, suite 13.” At that very first moment Swivel would be starting its patented stuff, creating that 3D world behind the scenes.
Then, for the second step, we’d say, “Show us what designs you want in that space.” There might be five or 10 different design families you can select from that you had created earlier, or you can use one that Swivel offers. It’s built up from this template, but you can customize pieces of it: “I want to use different lights here,” or, “I want to use a different trim.” A real common thing to do is insert the tenant’s logo or branding in the space.
Then, step three is you click a button, “Build it.” In 24 to 48 hours, you get a link back and you click on the link, and then you’re inside this virtual office that has been constructed on our platform.
You send it to your client, and they can tour that space with you. As you walk through, the client can go, “Oh, this is really neat,” or, “This doesn’t seem to be quite the right layout.” Then, you log back into Swivel, and you type in, “They want more meeting space, or more distance between the desks, or a different vibe in the kitchen. Change these three things,” and magically the next day, they’re changed.
This replaces weeks of opening CAD systems and editing spreadsheets, and sending 20 or 30 emails back and forth. You shorten what might take three to six months down to a couple of days.
TS: When touring, can you do things like freeze something at a certain place, or slow down the pace?
SH: Yes, It’s a little like playing a video game (by the way, we use technology developed for the video game industry, which has gotten fantastic at creating amazingly, sometimes scarily, accurate visual worlds). Using arrow keys or your mouse, you can freely navigate anywhere in that little 3D digital twin. You can also remove walls or see different options for where the walls are—redesign it on the fly, while you’re moving around.
TS: People are often a little leery of trying something new, especially when it comes to computer programs. How do you get them to use this?
SH: Swivel does not replace the other software tools that architects and design firms use day in day out, like AutoCAD and Revit. It’s just a very intuitive web-based tool, so simple that they can learn to use it in 10 minutes. Because you’re right, the last thing we wanted to do is require three months of training and reeducation for people who are very busy and have plenty on their plate.
TS: What do you think will make Swivel useful in our post-pandemic world?
SH: As people come back, and the mandates are lifted, everybody has the same questions: What’s my office look like post-COVID? How do I design my office, given both safety concerns and this thing called hybrid work? Half of my employees don’t want to come back to the office at all, and of those that do, some want to come to the office only a couple days a week. So, the design I had for my office prior to COVID maybe doesn’t work very well—specifically, those buzzy benching schemes, where everybody sat shoulder to shoulder. No one wants that anymore.
TS: Sounds like you’re predicting that Swivel is going to work both for brand-new spaces and for renovating current spaces?
SH: I think actually the second is bigger than the first, to be honest. Tens of millions of square feet of office space is going to get redesigned in the next year or two to work in our post-COVID modern work environment. Swivel can help us do that—take their existing layout, but then show them a new design that works for you in this hybrid world. The people who want to be in the office every day because they love it, they have dedicated desks. People who come in one or two days a week—these desks over here are reservable. Here are collaborative spaces where teams can work together, whether they’re Zooming someone in or not, and here’s a heads-down space where they can go and get privacy.
TS: If you had to name the single most innovative thing about Swivel Space Planning, what would it be?
SH: I think it’s that we can create a space plan for any office in the world almost overnight without ever seeing or visiting that space, and we can do it in complete 3D, making it 100% realistic. We even add accurate views out the window—you can actually see what’s across the street. I don’t want to be too braggadocio, but I don’t know of anybody else that can do it. That’s the real magic of Swivel.
Based in New York City, Troy Segal is a writer and editor specializing in the arts, dining, travel, and personal finance.