The office of the future offers many places to sit and work, but no place to call your own.
As it has for at least a decade, the struggle to define the office of the future will be played out in the context of the open floor plan, a partitionless space with desks in facing rows or clusters of four, six, or eight. It would be reductive to blame Dilbert for the death of the semi-enclosed cubicle, but the name of the comic strip, which came up frequently in interviews for this essay, serves as a convenient shorthand for everything workers, especially young ones, find soul-crushingly oppressive about traditional office design. Some variation of the open plan is the overwhelming choice for organizations with any pretense of hipness—which today is almost all of them, from Brooklyn start-ups to the General Services Administration, whose million-square-foot headquarters in Washington is being renovated (by Shalom Baranes, with Gensler doing interior design) to achieve what Janet Pogue, Gensler’s head of global workplace research, describes as “a more open and energetic workspace reflective of GSA’s sense of transparency and shared organizational culture.”