Changing Workplace : A Flexible Space Where Ideas Flow Rapidly
Something’s happening at the office--something’s happening to the office. Experts in disciplines ranging from artificial intelligence to interior design are rethinking how, when, why and where we work. Although their viewpoints and forecasts differ, all agree with Washington strategic planner Maree S. Forbes that “the rate of change in the U.S. workplace is unprecedented in our history and will touch us all.” Times staff writer Connie Koenenn interviews four of the nation’s top thinkers on work-space design.
Duncan B. Sutherland thinks the American office will undergo unprecedented change in the next decade, and offers two quick reasons why:
“On a humanistic level, most people are working in unsatisfactory settings that don’t support their potential. On a national competitive level, if we don’t change, we are going to get eaten for lunch because Japan and other countries are taking a very aggressive look at the future of white-collar workers.”
Sutherland, who specializes in new ways to organize people and technology, is studying the evolution of the work environment in the United States and its relationship to architecture.
But he doesn’t mention architecture or ergonomic chairs or computers when discussing the future workplace. In fact, he doesn’t like the word place, preferring to describe an office as a “collection of human beings who are information processors.”
And when Sutherland looks at today’s typical American organization, he sees a dinosaur dragging into a fast-track global market with all the baggage of its industrial revolution background.
“Basically, we work very much like people worked 100 years ago. We have a 9-to-5 workday, a central place to work and a hierarchical, relatively bureaucratic structure.”
All these get in the way of today’s need for flexibility and a streamlined information-processing strategy, he continued. “I think what we’re realizing is that we’re entering a global market era where the sine qua non of competitive advantage is intellect--coming up with the right ideas faster. This suggests that we need a form of organization that can tap that potential.”
Right now, he maintains, we are hampered by organizations that require a lot of data filtering. “Suppose that a customer has a good idea. It has to be passed on to the salesperson, then on to the marketing director, then on to product development, and so forth. The process is slow and each time it’s passed on, it gets altered a bit, like the story passed around the campfire.”
The need in today’s radically changing world, is to “get closer to the customer,” or bring the organization closer to the outside world by facilitating decision-making.
To Sutherland, the ideal organizational model is a system that can instantly communicate relevant experience so everybody can react in a shared way. With the computer network, he pointed out, we already have the technology to do that. What we need next is to break out of the physical box of the office.
Sutherland does not entirely buy into one common vision of the future: the idea of people staying home in their electronic cottages, doing the same work from home that they now do at the office. “Where you work is not important--it’s how you work. If I want to be a full-time daddy and work at home with my family, then that will enhance the quality of my work. (But) it’s not a matter of electronic cottage versus the office.”
However, he sees the electronic cottage as a start in breaking out of the office-as-physical-place philosophy. He suggests that designers take the blinders off and not presume that the office is a physical space with four walls, a floor and a ceiling.
“Design,” he said, “has to occur everywhere. If I can work anywhere, any time, in any space, good design means that it has to be as effective to work in my car as in my home office.”
This would demand, in his view, something like a national design agenda that might also require a new profession. “In Japan we are not separating the future of the office from the future of national transportation or national communications. Everything is being considered together.” The United States should do the same, he said. “For the first time in history we have the option to create a myriad of work environments, each one fine-tuned to meet the emotional, intellectual and physical demands of a task.
“That could be a traditional office or my home, my car, or my boat because I work in all those places.” Sutherland’s favorite model for the office of the future is drawn from the past. He likes to show audiences a slide of Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom/study at Monticello.
“Thomas Jefferson had really thought out the integration of work in his life,” he said. “His bed was between two rooms: he could roll out of bed on one side and be in his office and roll out on the other side and be in his home.”
