Tom Powers is a Chicago-based architect/designer and CEO and copresident of IA (Interior Architects), which maintains 19 offices throughout the world. Powers and IA have designed office, research, and hospitality interiors for tech and corporate giants, including American Airlines and LinkedIn.
Avinash Rajagopal: You have such a bird’s-eye view of how American workplaces have changed over the years. What are some of the major changes in how we work?
Tom Powers: A lot of the change in the workplace is driven by technology. One of the things that has really gone into overdrive over the last few years is the expectation that the workplace should be responsive to how people work—and how corporations and people want to advance innovation, and how the workplace can be part of that.
AR: Can you discuss some particular pieces of technology and how they’ve changed workplace design?
TP: One of the biggest was the laptop. Once it became more prevalent to have your laptop or an iPad in your hands, the mobility aspect really opened up. Expectations for the kinds of spaces people wanted to work in just changed fundamentally. You see a lot of that influence in work environments.
I’ve heard it being phrased as “wanting to work alone together.” For many, there’s a desire to work alone, but also to be next to other people and in a social kind of atmosphere. That’s a pretty significant change.
AR: Your clients straddle many different verticals and markets: technology companies but also more traditional sectors. Could you talk a little about technology from the clients’ perspective?
TP: We’ve been around for 34 years, so we’ve seen how this profession has evolved. I believe that the workplace got its feet in the more traditional companies—the banks, the IBMs—where there was a large workforce. But as the tech sector has developed, innovation has had such a significant impact. Turnaround times were quick, and the work environment started to respond. That’s where you saw all these agile work environments and collaborative spaces and less traditional spaces.
These workplaces attracted certain types of people who were also agile and innovative and collaborative. We saw companies recognizing the importance of individual inspiration. And other organizations, looking to the pace of innovation coming out of the technology world, said, “We want that same thing within our more traditional worlds.” Part of the solution is providing the spaces that leverage that kind of work.