Daniel Olberding: Designing for emotion and falling for DC

Now 15 years into his career, including the last 12 at CannonDesign, he's a compelling voice in workplace and hospitality design and a go-to designer for spaces that deeply reflect the people who use them.

Today, Daniel calls Washington, DC home, a city he loves in ways that might surprise you, and he's currently putting the finishing touches on CannonDesign's new office there. Ask him about cities, workplace culture, fiction or pop music and be ready, because he has thoughts — good ones. 

In his own words, as part of our My Voice series, here’s a deeper look at how Daniel sees the world.

The biggest mistake in workplace design is mistaking trends for solutions. Closed offices for everyone. Everyone stay home. Now open offices for everyone but make them lounge-like. Wait, everyone back in the office. The pendulum keeps swinging, and it’s all silly when you step back and think about it.  

The reality is that space is personal and culture is particular. No two organizations are the same. No two workspaces should be the same. 

If I could design for any client, it would be Dolly Parton's Foundation. Dolly changed lives in Tennessee and across the country through her philanthropy and literacy work. There's a space they haven't built yet that I think about, and it almost certainly involves rhinestones. I just think it's meant to be.

No one in my family was particularly creative, or at least they didn't express it. I was the one repainting my room every year, reorganizing everything and pitching my parents on a trip to Home Depot to swap out door hardware because it didn't match the new wall color. They were always supportive. 

Before anything is designed, I immerse myself in an organization's culture and the deep-rooted needs of its people to really understand the challenges we're trying to solve. If you don't do this, you end up treating symptoms instead of the real problem.  

I noticed how buildings made me feel before I even had a language for it. I’ve always been drawn to spaces that felt personal and lived in. The sterile and overly formal ones left me cold. That contrast stuck with me and probably set the course for everything I design today. 

The details that matter most are the ones people shouldn’t notice. For me, it’s always about transitions between materials and between spaces. A bad transition is jarring, but a great one just makes you feel something you can't quite name.  

My goal is always seamlessness as I want people to experience spaces and not audit the way they move through them. 

“What do we want people to feel here?” It's a question every designer should ask at the start of a project. For Creative Artists Agency’s (CAA) new hospitality-inspired workplace in Nashville, we took that question seriously and walked the client through an emotion diagram for each space before a single design decision was made. 

When you step off the elevator at CAA, you should feel that anticipatory rush similar to the way a musician feels right before they walk onstage, or an athlete feels before they step into the arena. Then, as you move into reception, the scale comes down, natural wood comes in and suddenly you feel like the agency is wrapping its arms around you. 

We went deep into designing every space. We steered clear of anything that felt stuffy like formal conference rooms or private corridors in favor of social hubs and shared spaces that reflect how people at CAA actually gather and connect. The setting feels less like an office and more like a string of intimate speakeasies. 

I didn't discover architecture until college. My best friend was in the interior design program and the studio demanded all her time. The only way to see her was to go there. I walked in, looked around and was blown away. I had never seen anything like it. I remember thinking, “What are you all doing here?” 

I found out the portfolio for the College of Architecture + Design at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was due a week before the application deadline. I spent every waking moment that week putting it together, and thankfully, I got in.  

I tell that story every time I mentor students because you always hear architects say they played with Lego and knew from age five that they were destined to become an architect. It's okay not to have that story.  

I moved to DC 12 years ago and was struck by the contrast of the city. History and modernity exist beautifully together. One block you're standing in front of a civic monument and on the next you're tucked into a neighborhood of rowhouses that feels like it's been there forever.

The scale is really intimate, but the city still feels alive. People think DC is just politics, and I love proving them wrong.

I started at CannonDesign as a design generalist. A couple of years in, someone introduced me to Meg Navin and the commercial practice. Honestly, it was their flat-out coolness that had me hooked. Then I heard them describe their clients as friends, and I thought, “who does that?” I felt like I'd found my home. I've been embedded in that practice ever since. 

Our new DC office will be a showcase of our craft. We’re moving into our new space in October. The building is an original 1910s Daniel Burnham with details you just don’t see anymore, like exposed terracotta ceilings and steel columns with rivets. We stripped everything back to honor that.  

The first thing you walk into will be a reconfigurable work café, and it sets the tone for everything. We designed this space, and the entire office, to be authentic to the character of the historic building and to who we genuinely are as a firm.  

The cafe will host everything from staff meetings to community events like our annual Designer for a Day, where we bring in 30+ students for a full day of exposure to design professions. So many of those kids arrive not knowing design is even a career path, and we get to be the ones who show them it is. 

But I genuinely need quiet. A solo hike or time spent in a coffee shop with a book, by myself, is incredibly important to me. My favorite local escape is Malcolm X Park on a Sunday. 

Quiet to me isn't actually quiet, though. I usually have pop music blasting in my ears. Zara Larsson, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga. Life gets serious fast, and pop music is where I find levity. Also, I like to bop. 

I'll probably never write a novel, but I keep the notes anyway. I keep an Apple Note full of story ideas that almost exclusively come to me at 2 a.m. when I should absolutely be asleep.  

I love fiction and the freedom it gives authors to build a world without constraint and let the reader fill the gaps. Designers are storytellers, too. We just have to find that freedom within the constraints and realities that come with physical space. 

Dolly has a quote that goes, “If you see someone without a smile, give them yours.” I like that.