The lexicon describing the choice of places to work is ever increasing. The now familiar terms home-working and tele-working have been supplemented with hub-working, co-working, central-working and shed-working. Alex Johnson refers to shed-working as “the art of working from home in a shed-like space separate from the house” [1].
My office
Since taking redundancy and setting up my own business six months ago, I have gradually migrated from the kitchen table to the shed. I do not intend to discuss the merits of shed-working in elaborate detail here. Alex has already done that and he has done it well using beautiful images of“shed-like” spaces from all over the world that illustrate his thesis. I can only offer a personal account of why I prefer shed-working.
I visited Colchester Zoo over the Christmas holidays and was really impressed with the quality of the animal enclosures. Clearly a lot of thought had gone into their design and a great deal of effort made in meeting the animals’ needs and making them comfortable. This was evident in the way the animals behaved and through the success of their breeding programme.
It got me wondering whether any lessons learned in zoo design are relevant to the workplace. However, I am not the first to make this comparison. Judith Heerwagen suggests “For insights, it is useful to look not at buildings, but at zoos. Zoo design has gone through a radical transformation in the past several decades. Cages have been replaced by natural habitats and geographic clustering of animals. And, as in nature, the animals have much greater control over their behaviour. They can be on view if they want, or out of sight. They forage, play, rest, mate, and act like normal animals”[1]. She continues “A key factor was concern over the animals' psychological and social well-being. Zoos could keep animals alive, but they couldn't make them flourish”. Heerwagen proposed that we learn from the new philosophy of enriched zoo enclosures, providing for well-being rather than simple survival, but can we also learn from the basic design principles in zoo enclosures?
This is a blog I recently made on behalf of 2degrees.
We all know the old adage “work is an activity not a place”. Due to emerging technology, particularly wireless networks and digital storage, we are no longer dependent on attending the office and can work at home, in arbitrary places – such as the café, library, clubs-hubs-pubs – and on the move. But the technology we have seen so far is just the start. Computing power is increasing exponentially and dramatically reducing in price, while the internet, wireless networks, cheap laptops and smart phones mean that we are now all connected in and out of work, locally and globally.
But work is not just about computer usage, it involves networking, meetings and creative thinking. Currently most of us in the UK work within the service industry, but we are entering a new industrial age, one of creativity and innovation. For UK plc to stay ahead we have to move towards an innovative and creative based industry.
It’s just one month to go before the next Workplace Trends conference on 20th October. It seems like a good opportunity to share my views on this year’s programme. It’s a great line up which I am genuinely looking forward to; this year could be our best set of speakers yet, but then again I do say that every year. But first a little history.
Did you know this will be the ninth Workplace Trends conference? It all started during the last recession (2002), I had just joined an architectural practice and, to be honest, I was getting a little bored at work. I proposed to the Board that we hosted a conference for our current and potential clients, to which they agreed. We had around 60 delegates at that first conference, my colleagues and some of our clients presented case studies. I quickly realised that the format was too constrained – how would we learn if we only drew knowledge from our own limited pool of expertise. The following year we brought in some heavyweights from our industry, paid for some Americans to come over, and invited our peers/competitors to speak or join the audience. That year we attracted nearly 200 delegates – we were off and, as they say, haven’t looked back.
At the recent CoreNet Paris Summit, the delegates at my session on Rethinking the Design Briefwere asked to prepare a three minute response to our presentations using the materials on each of their tables. One table had Lego, another Fuzzy Felt, another plasticine, another coloured paper and scissors and so on. The idea was that using different materials to a flip chart or PowerPoint might facilitate producing a more creative or lateral response.
Preparing a response
It’s not every day that you meet Donald Duck on the way to work, but this did indeed happen en routeto presenting at the CoreNet Global Summit held in Disneyland Paris. I shared the platform in person with Brian Szpakowski and virtually with Neil Usher, with the help of Susan Wagner who kept us on track. We each presented pecha kucha style then facilitated a practical session using different materials.
The theme of the session was “rethinking the design brief”and our idea was to challenge the way that our industry usually writes the brief for a new workplace. When you visit the majority of modern offices they appear, to me, to all be quite similar. They have large areas open plan desks with the more interesting (collaboration) spaces positioned around a central core; the desks are bench systems in white or grey with low screens and accompanying tambour units; colour comes in splashes at the end of corridors or in the limited number of breakout spaces; informal meeting and soft seating areas are parked in the irregular spaces that desks do not fit in, and so on.
Workplace strategists, and enlightened architects, often explore the organisation and its needs in order to design the space required to support the business; this is often referred to as “designing from the inside out”. Such organisational analysis includes understanding factors such as: the vision for the business, headcount projections, departmental adjacencies, and the culture. However, quite often fundamentals such as the nature of work, core work activities, preferred work styles and how to improve work performance are overlooked. This got me thinking “what is work” - surely unless we understand this basic question we cannot design workplaces that support work and enhance business performance?
As philosopher Arthur Little[1] once said “false notions of the nature and purpose of work lead logically to unnatural working conditions and these to disaffection and discontent amongst workers”. If you believe that “a happy workforce is a productive workforce” or that the primary function of an office is to support the business that takes place within it, akin to “offices are machines for working in”, then understanding “what is work?” must be the starting point of the design process for a new working environment.
