Overview

Our Studio

Baker Design Group takes an enlightened approach to design, offering clients a truly bespoke architectural experience. We offer design leadership to diverse, forward-thinking clients, levering an ever-restless creativity and multi-layered design thinking to develop environments that delight and fascinate people.

BDG provides comprehensive services that bridge architecture, technology design, interior design, branding, industrial design, exhibit design and planning. While our thinking is grand, our designs are intimate. Spaces have function and meaning. Advanced technology is intrinsic throughout, but transparent in every way. Obstacles are removed and deep connections are formed.

At the heart of our practice is a driving passion and joy for elegant problem solving, and we embrace unique and demanding projects. Your project can set a new benchmark for excellence in your industry. But the final product will be something that you inhabit. This is why we firmly believe in supporting your goals, ambitions and vision, not ours.

Through defining architectural forms, interior design finishes and furnishings, multimedia and graphics, BDG infuses spaces with unique brand personality. The resulting design engages the senses and tells a story that celebrates your organization's unique journey. At the same time, it supports and nurtures a highly functioning environment for today, while accommodating technologies and working styles as they advance well into the future.

BDG is a Boston-based firm that practices internationally, working with a global network of designers and engineers who support the needs of our multinational clients. We have successfully completed various type projects and delighted clients in the United States and 12 other countries around the world.

Stephen E. Baker, AIA, IIDA, IDSA
President

Stephen Baker is an architect, designer, planner and imaginative thinker who brings human-centered design to every project he embraces. Founder and president of Baker Design Group, Inc. (BDG), Stephen has worked with some of the world’s foremost thinkers and award-winning firms, leading projects and collaborative teams of architects and engineers to create museums, aquariums, educational centers, global corporate headquarters, hotels, and master plan developments across the United States, Italy, Japan and Germany.

Throughout his career, Stephen's passion for research and design has fostered a unique design approach, combining the disciplines of architecture, interior design, technology design, industrial design, exhibit design and planning to deliver uniquely branded programs and solutions. Each project leverages practical innovation, storytelling and intuitively engaged technology to embrace the ambitions of clients, while creating meaning and purpose for the project that extends far beyond architecture.

In 1997, Stephen founded BDG to create leading-edge projects and buildings worldwide through a unique and personal level of service for clients needing a comprehensive and strategic approach to design and building. As a boutique architecture and design firm, Stephen takes a hands-on approach to every project. Working as a close-knit team of internationally proven designers, the firm is dedicated to working with individuals, groups, and institutions who have an inspiring vision and mission for their purpose.

Since its founding, BDG has embraced unique and challenging projects of all types and scales: from top secret space exploration research facilities to university master planning, historic building restoration in London and Paris to a large scale mixed-use high-rise complex in the Middle East. The firm currently has projects located in 12 countries outside of the United States.

Sharing great ideas

TEDxNewEngland | Ideas Worth Acting On

Life offers countless challenges, opportunities, and gifts. How we face those challenges, create new opportunities for ourselves, and appreciate the gifts we receive defines each of our lives. "Ideas Worth Sharing" is the core of the hugely successful TED Conference in California. After attending each of these annual events — and applying their inspiration to many of our projects — Baker Design Group collaborated with WGBH Public Broadcasting to find innovators who might give their own TED Talks on the East Coast.

A licensed extension of the annual TED Conference, TEDxNewEngland brings a thought-provoking and inspiring experience to New England and beyond. The event is streamed live by Thomson Reuters to news bureaus worldwide, showcasing an eclectic and exciting mix of presenters and performers, all of whom follow TED's unique structure: to give the presentation of their lives in just 18 minutes or less.

It's been said that the greatest natural resource on earth is intellectual capital; our ideas create, inform, and shape the future. BDG believes the more we generously share this resource, the more we all grow, evolve and improve. And it is why we made such efforts to catalyze and curate this event. TEDxNewEngland is an incredible forum to communicate exciting work and ideas that address the needs and challenges of individuals and society, and to shine a spotlight on the passionate people whose inventions and research are creating a brighter future.

How does architecture influence online education?

Gather Education | Immersive Online Teaching Platform

We often find ourselves at the intersection of higher education and entrepreneurship. Our experience with passionate clients from diverse fields helps organizations act more like communities of learning, and educational institutions think more like entrepreneurs and innovators. This takes many forms: design strategy for planning and building design, media technologies, and the creation of new products like furniture and even virtual "teleportation" devices. It also inspires us.

When a long-time friend and client asked us to brief their technology leadership about developments in distance learning, we decided to envision what an ideal online classroom experience might be like. The work ignited our curiosity about ways virtual architecture could improve teaching and learning experiences.

Working with educators, game designers and technologists, we developed an immersive virtual education platform called Gather Education. Using off-the-shelf technology and basic Internet connections — and with the help of avatars and 3-D classrooms viewable from multiple viewpoints — teachers are able to lead online classes naturally, as they have for generations. Students engage with classmates and instructors as they do in a real-world setting. There's no new software to learn or barriers to the learning process.

The Gather Education platform was first demonstrated to teachers in January 2012. It's been shared with foundations and technology visionaries to both improve its capabilities and explore new models, like "buy a seat, give a seat" to extend access to less fortunate students. Today, teachers around the world are beginning to deliver classes and experimenting with the power of natural connections that Gather Education provides. A video demonstration can be seen at www.GatherEducation.com

Careers

Career Openings

We are always looking for exceptional people to join the BDG family. If you are an intellectually curious, enormously talented, multi-disciplinary thinker who constantly resets expectations in architecture, interior design, technology design, industrial design and planning, please contact us today.