It may be the question most asked of Studio O+A: What will be the future of the workplace?
Usually the question is framed in 10- or 20-year increments. It’s not difficult to project that far ahead: Just take a current trend and follow it to its logical conclusion—lounge space today, meditation space tomorrow, private nap pods a decade from now. Coming soon to an office near you: sleeping on the job!
Fifty years is a longer leap. When O+A’s design team began brainstorming for this project, everyone’s brain stormed dystopian: Artificial intelligence and robots will have taken all the jobs; global warming and economic displacement will have made our cities Hobbesian battlegrounds. Blade Runner is more fun to imagine than improved videoconferencing facilities, but eventually we had to recognize that 50 years is not 500. Society will still exist in 2068. Work will still exist. We will have likely made some accommodations to climate change, and we may in fact have become more responsible citizens of the planet.
O+A’s boldest projection for 2068 is a radical shift in the concept of “going to work.” Based on coworking arrangements today and the increasing sophistication of virtual environments (and assuming large corporations will retain their traditional interest in cutting costs), we imagine a time when behemoth businesses will eliminate the overhead of expensive and increasingly scarce real estate holdings. Instead of maintaining fixed offices for staffs performing cloud-based work, they will build community and loyalty by regularly convening the clan at bookable “agora spaces”—environments with chameleonic capabilities for socializing, collaborating, and connecting.
Here, then, is O+A’s pitch to Obake Corporation, a fictional company that converts architectural landmarks into high-end assembly spaces. It is 2068 in San Francisco. The weather is warmer. The Bay waters are higher. But the future is working out a little better than expected: You can still have coffee on the waterfront; you can activate your (virtual) laptop in a bamboo garden; your friend from Tokyo is working beside you in the form of a companionable glowing orb. It’s a bright spring day. Birds are chirping. There is not a murderous replicant in sight.
This article is part of the “tech x interiors” special section that was guest-edited by the design firm Studio O+A. The section, which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Metropolis Magazine, explores how technology is reshaping the workplace. Stay tuned to the Metropolis homepage as we publish more of these articles online!