“I’ve seen the future and it works”

Photo credit: Level 39 Europe's largest 'Fin/Tech accelerator', Canary Wharf, London (Gensler).

Following his participation as a panelist at two Gensler ‘The Office is Dead’ seminars at the Developing Cities Exhibition and the 100% Design Exhibition in London, Neil Usher (@workessence) returned the favour by inviting our own Philip Tidd to participate in his ‘Virtual Cuppa’ series published in December’s edition of On Office magazine.

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Wake up! We’re in The Matrix

Photo credit: Gensler

Recently I’ve attended a lot of meetings with clients who are interested in knowing what they should develop to not just attract the current wave of tenants but future waves of tenants as well. There seems to be uniform consensus that we’ve shifted from a spatial or program need evaluation criteria to a much more intangible experiential evaluation process because there is now greater opportunity to choose where we want to work. The conversation has shifted from fitting the perfectly proportioned conference room into a floor plan to “Do we even need a conference room? Why don’t we just have a big empty space for a hack-a-thon, that we can customize ourselves, and have some coffee to keep us up all night?” I’m relieved to know that amidst all this change coffee is still a staple of the workplace.

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Superstorm Sandy and the Lessons of Mobility

For companies with mobile employees, work continues despite empty offices.

It goes without saying that Superstorm Sandy was a devastating natural disaster that will not soon be forgotten in cities on the East Coast. While the focus remains on helping those who need it most, something that cannot be overlooked is the disruption to business continuity experienced by many organizations, which simply wasn’t anticipated by most disaster recovery plans. The scenario goes like this: the building is standing, and the power is even back on, but no one can get here!

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The Challenges We Face in Open Offices

Myriad challenges arise in open work spaces.

Thanks again to the Microsoft Global Workplace Strategies (GWS) team for allowing me to share their videos about the problems that arise in open offices! Here are four more. If this is the first of my posts about their videos you’ve checked out, you might want to see this earlier post for my favorite of the videos.

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Physical + Digital=The new reality of space

As a kid I remember watching science fiction movies and being amazed at how seamless and effortless technology appeared in every day “future” life. The technologies were as simple as Star Trek communicators or walls that recognized you and your preferences, but the boundary was blurry between physical and digital worlds. For much of my youth this was fantasy, but today I find myself truly operating more frequently in digitally dominated versions of physical space—spaces that I used to think were there for designers like me to create. The ubiquity of technology combined with contemporary society’s growing connectivity is creating a collective familiarity, if not an expectation, for spaces that seamlessly integrate with social media, big data and individual preferences. While not exactly the future imagined by science fiction, the future is now. This invasion of technology is fueling a new generation of designers, versed in consumer technologies, to rethink the consequences of meshing physical and digital space to create an experience that combines the best both worlds have to offer.

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