iDream was founded in 2003 as a workplace design and strategy consultancy. The question we started with was spatial: how should organisations design the physical environments their people work in?

Over the next two decades, that question kept widening. A well-designed space did not automatically produce a better experience. The physical environment mattered – but so did the digital tools, the processes, the management behaviours, and the organisational culture. Friction existed everywhere, not just in the room.

By 2013 it was clear that the practice had outgrown its original frame. Workplace design was one input into a much larger challenge: the challenge of designing the total experience of work. Over the years, that insight became the Employee Experience Design Framework: a seven-phase, thirteen-tool methodology that starts with friction and ends with measurement.

iDream today is an Employee Experience Design consultancy and a centre of learning for the discipline – working with organisations to remove workplace friction, and with professionals who want to practise the EXD Framework. The spatial intelligence that started the practice is still central to the methodology – it is one of the things that makes the EXD Framework genuinely different from every HR-led EX programme in the market. But it is now one dimension of seven, not the whole picture.