Clarkson once said on Top Gear that if you want to know what tech would be included in cars in five years’ time, look at what Mercedes-Benz are doing now and you’ll get a good idea.
But what about offices? What are they going to look like in five, or ten, or twenty years’ time? The first place to look is in the town of Cupertino in California. It’s the new home of Lord Foster-designed Apple Park, the tech behemoth’s five-billion-dollar, 176-acre HQ known to most as the ‘Spaceship Campus’ because, well, it looks like a spaceship. It’s a fitting moniker because the facts are, ahem, out of this world:
You get the picture. It’s vast. However not many of us have cash reserves of $215bn that allow us to spend the equivalent of Liechtenstein’s GDP on a new HQ, so let’s get back to some semblance of reality. What will the offices of the future – the ones we all work in and the ones we try and flog every day – look like?
Fundamentally, not a great deal will change. We’ll still need physical space to meet and work but as with every element of society, as human behaviour changes so do our needs, and the places we work in aren’t exempt from change …
spaces.com asked six of the world’s leading office-space experts what the office of the future will look like. Here’s what they said.
The Architect – Lord Foster, Founder & Executive Chairman, Foster & Partners
One of the world’s pre-eminent architects who is spoken about with the same reverence as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Zaha Hadid and IM Pei, Lord Foster is responsible for City Hall, the Reichstag Dome, the Millau Viaduct and Wembley Stadium and has sustainability at the heart of the next generation of office space.
‘Young people will choose office buildings based on facilities and lifestyle but also on their sustainability credentials. Future generations will be much more demanding and much more questioning in terms of what a potential employer will be doing to tackle climate change. I think we will see a shift where creating a good quality working environment which is more responsible in terms of sustainability becomes good for business as well as for the environment.’
The Workspace Innovator – Tanya Wood, Director, Soho Works
Soho Works is a 16,000 square feet co-working space in the old Tea Building in Shoreditch. Tanya Wood oversees the group’s co-working spaces in London as well as future expansion plans.
As one of the UKs leading co-working experts, she was asked how the concept of the office as a ‘business club’ will develop over the next few years and she suggests a focus on collaboration and empowerment:
‘People love to belong and feel part of something. The idea of professional networking is not new and by bringing this under one roof you create a very fertile ground for collaboration, which empowers workers. With co-working operators expanding globally, the membership becomes about much more than just a building or a physical space to work in; it’s also an international supportive community.’
The Connectivity Expert – Tamara Brisk, Managing Director, Wiredscore France
Launched by Michael Bloomberg in 2013, Wiredscore is ‘a commercial real estate rating system that empowers landlords to understand, improve, and promote their buildings' digital infrastructure.’
Tamara looks at the future of the office from a digital standpoint and understands that stimulation comes at different phases of the day so future working space designers need to be adaptable:
‘Future work spaces will provide different environments for different phases of work – like protective insulated cocoons for periods of deep concentration. These will be in addition to today’s stimuli-filled social co-working spaces that promote collaboration.’
She continues, ‘We will see more flexibility of space usage. For example, building cafeterias that were only used during breakfast and lunch hours in the past will serve as collaborative work spaces and meeting rooms. Open space offices will be divisible at the click of a button. We will also see fewer long-term leases. While businesses will still require and benefit from co-locating their employees, they will want more flexibility to add and subtract space as their needs evolve.’
The Accidental Entrepreneur – Mikael Benfredj, Founder, Patchwork
Mikael founded Patchwork, a furniture store in Paris that accidentally turned in an uber-cool co-working space when people started using the displays as makeshift workspaces. It is now used by the glitterati of the Paris design community and he suggests a move away from internal corporate values and a shift towards a more dedicated focus on those of partners and clients:
‘I don’t think companies will be separated the way they are today. There might not be one dedicated building for a single company. Or even dedicated floors. I hope large companies will want to expand their values and culture more profoundly around their partners and clients. Design will be sunnier – meaning it should have more space available outside – and smarter, meaning more automation.’
The Office Design Consultant – Despina Katsikakis, International Partner & Head of Occupier Business Performance, Cushman & Wakefield
A globally renowned expert on the impact of the built environment on business performance, Despina has advised, amongst other global behemoths, Google, Accenture, BBC, Deutsche Bank, Microsoft and GlaxoSmithKline on global real estate strategies and policies and buildings and workplace transformation through to processes and tools for real estate management.
She thinks that future office will offer more choice:
‘We will see a much more diversified portfolio or flexible and on-demand work spaces. Both the nature of corporate portfolios and our own personal workspaces will become a series of locations to work, based on convenience, function and comfort. This will mean they are much simpler and used much more intensively and intermittently.’ [There will also be] ‘more choice of environments, amenities and services with a focus on people’s performance. And I think we will see less offices with one-size-fits-all rows of desks with a focus on cost reduction and hard metrics.’
The Agent – Dan Harvey, Bay Area Occupier Services
Dan works closely with the biggest office occupiers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and has insight into current and future trends when it comes to office requirements of some of the world’s most innovative companies.
He also suggests choice will become a determining factor for office design in the future:
‘We’re already starting to see a pushback on some of the tech and the elimination of privacy. So a departure from open-plan as a blanket design default and a move back to some private offices. Collaboration is great but there is an emerging feeling that without a choice, people are sometimes finding it challenging to get stuff done so through that push for a productive workforce, future offices may become more private again.’
What do you think? What will the offices of the future look like? Remember, in the 1950s we were promised robot butlers and holidays on the moon (and, thanks to the 1980s vision of Robert Zemeckis in Back to the Future, hoverboards…) so manage your expectations accordingly but we’d love to hear your thoughts.
As usual, answers on a postcard please to @BDG_SP.