Still Changing Workplaces

During the past decade, workplaces have undergone transformation along with the rapid change in the business and technology environment. However, since business and technology keep developing, workplaces will continue to change as well. As new frameworks are starting to take shape, we are reaching a stage at which we need to verify the new trends and envision their future images from various aspects.


 
    Bang&Olufsen/Struer, DENMARK
What Design Communicates
In this era of virtual spaces taking over physical spaces as a result of an advancing of information technologies, the office is more significant as an emotive space for human interactions and a space for expressing a corporate identity, rather than a space just for working. Therefore, office design should take the role of a media to express such a meaning. The office is the best tool of narration with which a corporation can talk about itself.
Struer, a small town with a population of 17,000, facing the beautiful Limfjorden, thrives on three industries--agriculture, fishery and audio equipment manufacture. This town situated quite away from the capital Copenhagen is known to be the home of Bang & Olufsen (to be referred to as B&O), a renowned audio equipment manufacturer. Its new headquarters office built on a meadow near the bay now attracts attention from home and abroad. Cutting-edge in technology and graceful in shape, this building is a work of art which superbly expresses the production philosophy B&O has upheld for many years, "Essence and Simplicity."
 
BANG&OLUFSEN/Struer, DENMARK
 
Building the Change Tool
Restructuring of business systems and mergers of companies --tides of reform are washing ashore business organizations. To cope with such a situation, facilities are now required to play the role of a tool promoting and supporting reforms. The office is no longer a vessel housing people and equipment. It keeps steadfastly progressing to become a system supporting, with agility and flexibility, such trends as pliable organizations, nomadic workstyles, and evolving technologies.
The headquarters office of Boots The Chemists (BTC), a refurbishment of a historical construction, provides state-of-the-art environments to serve as a catalyst to create new workstyles based on flexible teamwork, while deftly retaining the characteristics of a classic modern building monumental in the architectural history of the UK. Boots' head office renovation project, whose outline was reported in ECIFFO 34, has been completed in 2000. The following account reveals the new headquarters in its entirety.
 
Boots The Chemists/Nottingham, ENGLAND
 
IT Evolves Space  
The ever evolving IT has been altering the concept of what the office should be. Even a simple change in the monitor screen from CRT to liquid crystal would radically change the shape and size of the desk. And a phenomenal change would result if one would have wireless LAN everywhere complemented with additional new technology. Then the office would be born anew as a hybrid space integrating the virtual and the real.
As teleconferencing and e-mail have become day-to-day modes of communication, people have come to rediscover the importance of face-to-face communication and collaboration. What role should the physical space play in the office which has been moving towards virtualization? The "roomware" developed by the AMBIENTE team at GMD-IPSI is an answer to this question which shows a promising new direction.
Beyond Organizations
Fast changing business environments accelerate organizations to renovate their structures. IT, on the other hand, swiftly jumps over the boundaries between organizations, making them virtually nonexistent. There is no longer a clear one-to-one relationship between people and their workplaces, between organizations and their offices. New organizational structures which transcend conventional frameworks are emerging, bringing with them new workstyles.
Future Office, based in Stockholm, creates new office spaces by forming a virtual organization with other companies on a project basis. Just as its name implies, it is the home of a future-driven workstyle.
 
Future Office/Stockholm, SWEDEN
 
Creating Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs are creative and daring people, blessed with ideas and technological expertise innovative enough to launch venture businesses head on, but often they are young and short of capitals. Only if they had easy access to spaces and know-how to start up new businesses. A small town in Sweden saw the dream realized--the birth of a space capable of meeting such needs.
StartupPark is nothing like a rental office for which you have to pay per square meter and renewal charges every three years. StartupPark puts an emphasis on encounters of people and support services rather than offering physical spaces. To be short, it is a magnet to draw people and an incubator where new businesses are hatched.
 
Startup Park/Norrkoping, SWEDEN
 
Navigating Future Ideas
The bottom line of an organization is people, and fundamentally speaking, it is these people who possess knowledge, experiences and skills. If so, strategically interfacing workers with different technological fields and different skills must be a shortcut for corporations to create new business opportunities. Here is a new experiment encouraging people to interact with each other.
ABB, a heavy electrical equipment manufacturer, established the Future Center in September, 1999. The Center has grown from the space for interaction to the space where new business is created. The Center provides ABB employees with capitals to implement their nascent ideas. Therefore, the Future Center serves as a platform for in-house ventures, fostering new enterprises, which transcend the borders of the existing businesses.
 
ABB Future Center/Vasteras, SWEDEN
 
What's Next?
DEGW, a world leader in office design and consulting, has designed many leading-edge offices, some of which were covered in ECIFFO 34 and are still fresh in the memory of our readers. In this issue, the first in the 21st century, ECIFFO interviewed Francis Duffy, Founder, Despina Katsikakis, Managing Partner, Worldwide, and Andrew Harrison, Director of Research & Methods, focusing on the future of the office and the current challenges it faces.
The City is the Office
Now that information networks cover the entire world like a large cobweb, we don't have to be confined to our offices when we work. In such a situation, an inquiry into the future of workplace needs an approach more comprehensive than relying only on the office space as a tool of analysis. We must think in terms of a larger context such as society or life as a whole. DEGW's project, "The City is the Office", led by Andrew Harrison, is based on such an approach. It is an attempt to tap the potential of various urban locations as a workplace.