The office brief used to be very simple. Desks for all the staff. Meeting rooms to cater for the max occupancy of a Tuesday. A kitchen. A breakout space if the company was generous. Everything else was pretty much rent.
This brief has disappeared and the designers still writing it have run out of space.
The big change is people can work from home and a lot of them do. Often. An office full of desks for three days a week is not a productivity problem to solve. It’s a question. What is this space for and why would anyone leave their kitchen table to be here?
As we see it now, offices have to earn the commute. This means they have to offer what home cannot. The brief has changed from ‘house the workforce’ to ‘give a reason to come to the office’.
In terms of design, the focus has changed the priority. More collaboration spaces and fewer individual desks. Greater consideration of acoustics and more hospitality design. This means better coffee and lighting and spaces that look like they would be enjoyable to spend a day in rather than a space that would be a pleasure to leave as the work day has come to an end.
Designing an office is more than just choosing new furniture, painting a feature wall, and adding a pool table or ping pong table. These changes are all superficial. If a space doesn’t offer more than a kitchen table, that pool table just becomes an unmovable piece of furniture.
Offices that thrive in the current environment possess some common characteristics. They are built around the reason people come to work. Most people come to work to collaborate, build social connections, and perform activities that are best done together. There are different types of spaces that provide different types of activities or functions. There are spaces that provide the ability to concentrate, spaces that provide opportunities to communicate, and spaces that provide opportunities to take a break and step away. They take separation of space and privacy seriously and have done away with assigned desks.
The design of the office takes into consideration the problems posed by the journey of getting to work. The commute is part of the work day. An office that opens at 9:15 with empty water coolers and last night’s dirty mugs in the sink doesn’t justify the cost of the commute, but one that greets commuters with a friendly atmosphere does.
The new office designs have made the brief more exciting. Constraints are more limiting, the problems are more precise, and the work done has to be justifiable in a way it previously did not. Naturally some clients still want the previous office design, but part of the new office design is to have that design in a different way.