“At Microsoft it is understood that the future will be an amalgamation of all the sciences and arts—and that it will be bright and playful,” O+A’s Primo Orpilla says. The space features a living wall, acoustic baffles for each seating area, and furniture from Muuto.
If you take the door off the conference room, will the meeting be just as productive? That’s a question Microsoft, in collaboration with San Francisco–based Studio O+A, is hoping to answer. The two have partnered for the design of Microsoft’s Envisioning Center, an evolving space for testing prototypes at the tech company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters. Unlike most testing facilities, however, the Envisioning Center isn’t a lab, but rather a fully designed environment where both in an active setting. In this case, that setting is the office of the very near future.
“If you could work from anywhere, what is the workplace for?” asks Anton Andrews, Microsoft’s director of office envisioning. As both the automation of simple tasks and remote access to information increase with new technologies, he foresees a greater emphasis on creative, in-person exchanges. “There’s this need to collaborate and connect in a much more agile, real-time way,” Andrews says, “and a lot of the old tools, processes, and environments are too static, too linear, and too hierarchal.”