Metropolis publisher and editor in chief Susan S. Szenasy moderated State of Design: Where We Work, a panel discussion hosted by Meadows Office Interiors in their Manhattan showroom. The panel featured Tom Krizmanic, principal of STUDIOS Architecture; Simon Speak, business development director of Haworth, Inc.; and Gabrielle Rubin Deveaux, senior director of real estate at BuzzFeed. The group discussed the challenges and benefits of creating age-neutral office spaces for today’s employees.

The group acknowledged that some older workers are resistant to drastic changes in the traditional work environment: the key is to try and balance individual concerns with the needs of the business. Said Krizmanic, “You look at the decisions through the lens of what the organization is trying to do so that everybody, from the youngest person to the oldest person, should be on board with that, and then peel off the slight variations that may make the acceptance of the design more palatable.”  

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Lack of private space in office interiors is constraining the creativity and productivity of workers, according to data from two new UK workplace surveys. Gensler's 2016 UK Workplace Survey found that workers were more likely to be innovative if they had access to a range of spaces supporting different working styles, including private, semi-private and open-plan environments.

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In America at least, the great symbol of corporate conformity is the office cubicle. Satirised in the Dilbert cartoons and a staple in any movie about the degrading aspects of modern working life, the cubicle provides a perfect shorthand way of portraying an individual crushed by the corporate jackboot. Yet what these things miss is the propensity of people to personalise their surroundings and claim a space as their own, even if only for the short time they may be there. This seems to be particularly the case when it comes to office design and so we were much taken with this blog which lists the most far out and quirky ways people in the US have found to personalise their cubicles. Of course the need and urge to personalise space are not limited to the US. We often find in the course of our own installations that the first thing people do when they occupy an office for the first time is to personalise their space.

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Employees believe their workplace is not making best use of latest technology, but expect this to improve as remote work begins to provide both quality of life and productivity benefits. In the latest Future Workforce Survey conducted by Dell and Intel, nearly half of global employees believe their current workplace is not smart enough, while 42 percent of millennial employees say they are willing to quit their job if technologies are not up to their standard. The research suggest that the addition of collaborative tools and innovations such as internet of things (IoT) and Virtual Reality (VR) will soon become vital to the workplace. According to the poll of nearly 4,000 full-time employees in ten countries, over half (57 percent) believe they will be working in a smart office within the next five years, while 51 percent believe that better technologies will make face-to-face meetings redundant within the next five years.

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It seems like we don’t have to wait more than a few days at a time before some or other organization is making its own prognosis about how we will be working in the future. The thing these reports usually share in common, other than a standardized variant of a title and a common lexicon of agility, empowerment and connectivity, is a narrow focus based on their key assumptions about what the office of the future will be like. While these are rarely false per se, and often offer valuable insights, they also often exhibit a desire to look at only one part of the great workplace elephant. The more serious reports invariably make excellent points and identify key trends, it has to be said. However, across them there are routine flaws in their thinking that can lead them to make narrow and sometimes incorrect assumptions and so draw similarly flawed conclusions. For this reason, talk of the office of the future tells us a lot about how we view offices right now.

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Is your office stifling your creativity? A recent survey, conducted by the global architecture firm Gensler, suggests as much. The good news: You can do something about it.

The online survey, called the 2016 Workplace Survey, sought to uncover whether a workplace can make employees more creative and entire organizations more innovative. It drew more than 4,000 people from 11 different industries including tech, government, finance, media, and biological sciences. The respondents had to work in offices some of the time and for companies of more than 100 employees. About two-thirds of those surveyed believed that they work in spaces that crush creativity and innovation.

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It’s open season for the workplace.

The UK has one of the highest percentage of open plan work environments in the world, and has, on the surface, appeared used to and comfortable with this way of working for quite some time. Look a little deeper, however, and this may not be entirely true. While the physical infrastructure of the workplace has evolved more towards an open plan environment, it is the speed at which the metaphysical infrastructure of today’s workplace has rapidly transformed our approach to work that is having a profound impact on people’s ability to work effectively.

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