The workplace has gone soft and I mean that in a good way. Over the past fifteen to twenty years we have experienced the very welcome development of a much softer aesthetic generally when it comes to the design of offices. This process has accelerated dramatically since we came out of the recession and more and more firms have turned to models of flexible and agile working as a source of competitive advantage. Often wrongly characterised as the feminisation or domestication of design, this is linked to the way that management thinking and consequently workplace design has focussed on softer business issues such as corporate culture, the environment and knowledge management. To a large extent this has come about as a matter of necessity. At its heart are several interrelated issues. The most important is this; if your main asset is knowledge, how do you attract the heads that contain that knowledge to your organisation?
The growth of agile working and the softening of workplace design