Conference and show season looms and with it arrives the annual swarm of workplace trend forecasts. These are often presented as groundbreaking but many of them are indistinguishable from each other and based on some very familiar tropes and assumptions. These days such things tend to be shaped into lists, because that’s how the Internet likes it. That is all perfectly natural and we are free to make our own mind up which of these features are meaningful and which are hack jobs. No football pundit was ever fired for stringing together clichés rather than thinking and talking, and no marketing person has ever lost their job for publishing a list of Ten Trends.
One thing all of these lists seem to share is an assumption that many of the ideas they reflect are new. That’s understandable. Nobody wants to think that what they consider to be on trend has all been seen before.
So it is for many of the office design trends that underpin these features. Twenty and more years ago, office design really was undergoing a complete rethink and much of this was captured in a series of books that attempted to make sense of what was unfolding. One of the best of these was undoubtedly Frank Duffy’s The New Office which is replete with ideas and language that could be transposed into 2018 with almost no trouble at all.
The reason the book works so well is firstly that Duffy understood that the major tension that drives changes in the way we design offices is that which exists between the building, human beings and technology. The second reason is that he provides a snapshot of how this tension is being resolved with case studies, rather than theorising. Firms often find themselves unknowingly innovating in the way they use their offices because they are addressing the tensions that exist in their business in a purely practical way.
Of course, the major change in the relationship between the three key elements that make up a workplace when Duffy was writing was technological. The mid 1990s was the point at which the world was tipping from analogue to digital, from fixed to mobile and this is clearly reflected in the examples used in the book.