The Office Isn’t Over: How Design Can Redeem the Physical Workplace
Thoughts on workplaces, collaboration, and design.
It may appear that offices are now obsolete. With one third of Americans currently working from home, and many companies boasting increased productivity, the Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped the way people work and collaborate. But it feels premature to disregard the importance of sharing physical space after one year of remote work in extremis. Covid-19 gives us a unique opportunity to reimagine the office as a site of fulfillment beyond the classic startup employee perks of kombucha and beer on tap. Through thoughtful design, we can create workplaces that not only enhance our experience of being at work, but actually enrich our lives.
My studio creates interactive art installations that encourage face-to-face connection. In short, our work uses technology as a social catalyst. These face-to-face interactions, and the relationships they strengthen, are massively important in the workplace. In addition to personal affinity, in an office setting relationships are built on the premise of collaboration or mentorship. Studies already show that social media has significantly changed the way we form, and operate within, relationships. A lot is risked by mediating our professional relationships entirely through screens.
We can engineer our work environments to foster unlikely connections between coworkers, or to boost employee satisfaction, or even to strengthen a company’s esprit de corps. We can and should make offices that employees ultimately choose to be in, that adapt to the needs of the people that inhabit them, rather than the other way around.
A cult theory — popular among Fortune 500 executives — is that the best ideas are generated by “collisions” between unlikely suspects. Tech companies like Zappos, Samsung, and Google have been trying to encourage and accelerate these collisions for years. Architects and designers have tried all sorts of things to make people collide, ranging from narrower hallways, tinier meeting rooms, and longer lunch tables, to reducing the number of coffee machines and bathrooms on-site. During the pandemic, through Zoom and other video conferencing tools, companies have been trying to create employee collisions artificially. GitLab, for example, uses a “Donut” bot to randomly pair remote employees for “virtual coffee breaks.” While I commend GitLab’s creativity, I am skeptical about the extent to which algorithms can synthesize serendipity. Do digital blind collaboration dates build the same level of trust between strangers as their in-person counterparts?
Reconfiguring floor plans and limiting access to vital resources like toilets and coffee are not the only strategies that companies can pursue to encourage employees to interact randomly. In my experience, the best way to do this is through creating opportunities for play. When designing for interactivity, my studio favors systems that can be used by multiple people simultaneously. When people play together they let their guard down. In the workplace hierarchies soften; strangers become friends. Employee-play might be facilitated by a kinetic “watercooler” artwork that responds to the movements of passersby, or a wall-sized digital display that interprets the foot traffic in and out of a building’s lobby. The dividends of collaborative play may not be immediately evident in terms of productivity or profit. But unexpected moments of play have a disarming effect, encouraging openness to new people and ideas. These interactions nourish creativity and innovation, and our workspaces should be designed so as to maximize the frequency of their occurrence.
For many people, working in an office engenders a sense of common purpose. People who feel like they belong to a community of individuals working toward a common goal will feel more connected to that goal. This sense of common purpose, more so than anything else, drives employee loyalty, individual productivity, and collaboration. At my studio, my team’s common purpose is to create artworks that connect people to places, brands, and one another. Naturally, if Patten Studio’s mission statement is to “connect people,” we are invested in the health of our company culture. The most important culture-maintenance ritual we have is team lunch. We talk about our lives and about the pandemic, and there’s usually a conspiracy theory of the day, but a surprising amount of ideation happens organically when the studio hangs out without a set agenda. We joke about “what-if” scenarios. What if you could play laser tag to go grocery shopping, and by “zapping” toilet paper with your smartphone it’s automatically added to your bag at checkout? What if coming to work were like that Flaming Lips concert where everyone was inside an inflatable bubble? We’re lucky to have a large, well ventilated space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard that allows us to socially distance. Our team sits spread out across the studio, one person at the conference table, another on the couch, others at their workstations or, really, anywhere outside of the fabrication space. Above our heads, a prototype of Lift flutters while we eat and chat, subtly responding to our movements. Lunch with the team leaves me feeling inspired and connected. We eat surrounded by studio projects in various stages of development. Everywhere we turn we are reminded of what we make together, and of the value of our labor.
As an artist, my impulse is to take something abstract, like Purpose, and make it visible, or tactile. A dynamic, physical representation of an idea is more resonant than a static mission or vision statement painted on a wall in a lobby. Imagine a kinetic sculpture that changes shape as an organization’s workforce collaborates to solve a massive problem. Imagine a visual artwork that transforms in real time in response to a company’s global activity: where it’s reaching, what impact it’s having. The future of the office is experiential, and experience design will play a key role in communicating to employees and visiting clients what a company does and what it stands for. Beyond that, experience design will play a key role in making our offices more desirable places to be, whether we spend 40 hours a week in them, or visit them periodically.
People all over the internet are declaring the success or failure of WFH, but the truth is that 11 months, or even two years of data aren’t enough to determine the long term consequences of mass telecommuting. And while some companies, like Toptal and WordPress, have been 100% remote for years, we do not know how remote work will affect employees across industry, job function, or personality type. There are people who work best in solitude, but it seems likely that computer programmers, artists, and customer service representatives all have distinct optimal working conditions. When my studio develops a new kinetic artwork or technology, like Lift, we fast-forward it through five years worth of use, or roughly 1 million interactions. Inevitably, the first prototype breaks. The point of this testing is to find out what part breaks, after how many years/cycles of use, and why. At the end of the day, declarative statements about remote work are based off of conjecture. Remote collaboration has not been stress tested. Our data is incomplete.
We should also note that increasingly people are raising concerns regarding the potential ethical implications of wide-scale obligatory work from home post-pandemic. Right now companies are essentially operating rent-free out of their employees’ homes, and many employees are seeing their utility bills go up with no employer contribution. Richard Shearmur, a professor at McGill’s School of Urban Planning, calls this the expropriation of an employee’s private living space. There was a court case about this in Switzerland in 2019 that won remote employees compensation proportional to their employers’ savings. Telecommuting may be working for some now, but employees and employers alike should not take it for granted.
Prophylactic design measures that enforce social distancing and touch-free environments are going to be huge in coming years. Still, designers cannot lose sight of what a shared workplace offers employees: creative stimulation and emotional connection. Compared to technology, architecture is slow moving. A building’s life cycle is measured in decades, but we live in a society where people replace their cell phones every three years. I am confident that design can make our workspaces better: more profitable, but also, more creative, more fulfilling, and more connected. Some employees may be more productive working in isolation at home, and this will translate to a spike in profit. However, a shared office space does not exclusively exist to drive profit in the short term; it is also a site of relationship forming, innovation, and employee fulfillment. Jettisoning these intangibles in favor of real estate savings is shortsighted.
