Informal workspace may once have been painted as all air hockey tables and beanbags when businesses started to experiment with it during the first dotcom boom. It has taken time for the spirit typified by Google or Facebook to filter down to banks, global accountancy giants and law firms. But there are few modern offices across the world that remain untouched by the move towards some form of informality in workplace design.
“People are working less conventionally nowadays,” says John Symes, Director of Workplace at JLL in London. “This is why the semi-private spaces, secondary work-settings, work pods – whatever you want to call them – have developed. They facilitate collaboration which if you do that in a conventional environment you are stuck. Because if you collaborate at a desk it disturbs everyone around and if you collaborate in a meeting room then you take that space away from everyone else.”