By Mark Eltringham
Edition 8 – Winter 2016 Pages 29-33
Tags: technology• workplace design • productivity
Predicting the future is a mug’s game. However much we know about the forces we expect to come into play in our time and however much we understand the various social, commercial, legislative, cultural and economic parameters we expect to direct them, most predictions of the future tend to come out as refractions or extrapolations of the present. This is a fact tacitly acknowledged by George Orwell’s title for 1984, written in 1948, and is always the pinch of salt we can apply to science fiction and most of the predictions we come across.
This is the fundamental reason why a typical report or feature looking to explore the office of the future invariably produces a hyped-up office of the present. This has sufficed to some degree up till now because the major driving force of change – technology – has developed in linear ways. Its major driver since Gordon Moore produced his eponymous law in 1965 has been miniaturisation. If we can expect computing power to double every 18 months, as More predicted, we at least have a degree of certainty about technological disruption. Of course, this has already had a profound effect on the way we work and the way we use buildings. So too has the secondary prime technological driver of the early 21st Century, the digitisation of the past and present.
Disruptive though these forces are, they have developed in ways and within a context that we can readily understand and forecast.
However, that is all about to change and in ways we have no way of knowing with any certainty. There’s a good chance we cannot imagine what is about to happen with some of the technologies now being developed and which may soon start to feed back into themselves in a positive feedback loop. As the biologist JBS Haldane once remarked; “I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
We are no longer faced with an era of linear miniaturisation and digitisation, but one in which a number of technological forces coalesce to create a perfect storm of uncertainty. For each of these, there has yet to emerge a consensus about the nature of the technology itself and its implications for the world, so the idea we can predict with any certainty what will happen in the eye of the hurricane is fanciful at best.
Even if there were a general consensus about the implications of specific new technologies, it would likely be out of date before this journal had a chance to garner even the thinnest layer of dust. But we must be aware of them and gauge their implications for commerce, society, philosophy and the economy. Eternal vigilance is not just the price of freedom but is now the price of living in the 21st Century.
There are a number of specific challenges that this creates for those who work in the fields of office design, architecture, commercial real estate, facilities management, human resources and what IT and all the myriad disciplines and professions involved in the chimera we now call ‘workplace’. The most important is one that has been around for a very long time and it is how to resolve the tensions created by the different speeds and life cycles we might attribute to the facets of the workplace.In particular, because the way we work changes so quickly, buildings need to have flexibility built into them so that they meet our needs today but anticipate what we will need tomorrow.
In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand outlines the process whereby buildings evolve over time to meet the changing needs of their occupants. He describes each building as consisting of six layers, each of which functions on a different timescale. These range from the site itself which has a life cycle measured in centuries, through to the building (decades), interior fit out (years), technology (months), to stuff (days). The effectiveness of a workplace design will depend on how well it resolves the tensions that exist between these layers of the building.
The principles behind this complex situation have been known to us for a long time, at least since the 1970s when Frank Duffy first introduced the world to his ideas about the physical and temporal layers of the building – in his terminology the ‘shell, services, scenery and sets’. The balance between these layers may have shifted significantly in recent years, but the tensions between them continue to determine how well we design and manage our workplaces.
Consequently, the ability to respond to change is perhaps the most important facet of an effective design. Creating this level of responsiveness is described in the Facilities Design and Management Handbook by its author Eric Teichholz as ‘the basic driver of the facilities management workload.’
While the nature of work has already changed in many ways, the pace of change has increased even more dramatically over recent years and we still ain’t seen anything yet. So the challenge is how best to manage change, keep costs down and provide a flexible home for the organisation so that whatever happens in the future, we can at least meet it with a degree of confidence. Successful management of change is a good thing, an agent of growth and commercial success. Change handled badly can hamstring an organisation.
The standard answer to the challenge is to build flexibility into the building. At the property management level, this may mean a change in contractual terms, notably in the length of leases, and the provision of lease breaks. Varying levels of flexibility must also be apparent through the rest of the building in terms of its design and management. If we take an idealised view of the modern office as a flexible, social space for a peripatetic, democratised and technologically literate workforce, the solution lies in an increased use of desk sharing, drop in zones, break out space and other forms of multi-functional workspaces. In many offices individual workspace is already being rapidly replaced by other types of space, quiet rooms and collaborative areas.
Flexibility must be hardwired into the building at a macro-level. Not only must floorplates be capable of accepting a wide range of work styles and planning models, servicing must be appropriate and anticipate change. That doesn’t mean just in terms of technology and telecoms but also basic human needs such as having enough toilets to deal with changing occupational densities. It also means having a HVAC specification that can deal with the changing needs associated with different numbers of people and different types of equipment.
Elements of the interior that were once considered static are also having to offer far larger degrees of flexibility including, furniture, lighting, storage and partitions. This issue of flexibility has become more important within interior design. Interior elements should now define space, portray corporate identity, comply with legislation and act as an aid in wayfinding. They must do all this and be able to adapt as the organisation changes.
Yet all of this is still only scratching the surface of the issue. It’s not exactly cosmetic and it will apply to a far larger proportion of the office market than many workplace futurists would lead you to believe, but it is not exactly game changing. That will happen elsewhere and will involve a complete rethink of the way we view work and workplaces.
This presents a particular challenge for the various workplace disciplines because they’re still clinging on to both their own established ideas and the demarcations they think still apply. At some level, they’re aware that the gig is up, which is why you’ll see trade associations toying with allegiances with others who have overlapping interests. It’s why commercial property firms are moving into the fit-out market. It’s why the major technology firms are moving into new realms in the physical world such as the Internet of Things and driverless vehicles. It’s why coworking spaces are coming to dominate the commercial property markets in the world’s major cities. It’s all a sign of an upcoming great reckoning which will see the creation of a new order for the workplace.
There will be casualties, especially amongst those organisations who can’t grasp the enormity of what’s about to happen and so will drown in the technological immersion. Trade associations are still hankering for a place at the boardroom table unaware of or unwilling to admit to the fact that their immediate priority should not be status, but survival. They still view Big Data as a way to build their case, not as part of the wave of technology that is about to fall over their heads….