There may be days you dread going to the office. Your 8-by-10-foot cubicle is starting to feel cramped. Your Instagram filters all look beige, and no matter how you adjust your lumbar support, your neck feels like that of a sick crane’s. Scenes from Office Space seem achingly poignant, not for their satirical bite, but their verisimilitude. You feel about as creative as a brick wall.
But imagine, for a moment, a different option: You’re seated on the plush fabric of a high stool in a richly colored room Eero Saarinen might admire. It is called the Ideation Hub. It registers as a conference room, but there is no straight-grained rectangular table, no one fumbling with a laptop to pull up their PowerPoint presentation, or smiling awkwardly in an out-of-sync video conference. Instead, your colleague is marking up a book-length document with a stylus on an 84-inch-wide, wall-mounted Microsoft Surface Studio computer screen; all of her annotations are saved in the Cloud and linked to your laptop. You can see the whole spread; the budget, the notes from the legal team, everything. So can your colleagues in Munich who are making their own notes and suggestions. People aren’t sitting quietly and staring at their thumbs. They’re openly sharing ideas.