Beyond Hot-desking - Configurable, Dynamic Workspaces
From the archive: written before or outside the Architect Tomorrow newsletter, so it may be out of date.
How much of the time do you find desks are empty during the day as colleagues are in meetings?
And so often there are never enough meeting rooms or they aren’t quite big enough!
Perhaps what we need are adaptive spaces for the office? Offices that dynamically adapt based on schedules and preferences of employees. Imagine being able to set your preferences for the day or half day based on whether you need:
- Quiet working space
- Collaboration space
- 1-2-1 meeting space
- Need to give a large or perhaps departmental briefing to an entire floor or section of a floor of an office?
Seem impossible? Infrastructure and furniture is fixed right? Or at the very least is time consuming and costly to move?
Well check this video out - RoboWall - the concept of robotic room dividers to create a reconfigurable space:
Whilst it’s a cute example for the home I actually wonder if it makes more sense for the open plan office environments? Hopefully we’ll see this sort of thing in offices of the future. I see this as a great example of the Internet of Things (IoT) applied to the digital physical workplace / workspace. Imagine your desk, meeting rooms, wall dividers and other office furniture being connected. Condecco for example already offer some clever solutions but I think they are just scratching the surface…
If you liked this you might like some of my previous articles on connected devices and enchanted objects - a world beyond apps.
Originally published on LinkedIn. Comments and discussion live there.