October 21, 1999

Workplace design rules are changing fast

By DOUGLAS A. BORS, P.E.
Sparling

Imagine a place where you can negotiate with and entertain clients while transmitting instructions to your office in Chicago or Washington, D.C. Imagine a place where you can simultaneously give a visual "thumbs up" to your assistant and read your investment portfolio, all without leaving your steaming cup of joe.

This place exists, and it's a lot closer than you might think.

This article is about change in the workplace, change that involves and depends on businesses, people and technology. Technology offers new possibilities. People explore new tools to harness technology. And business exploits peoples' new skills, and then demands continually new and better technology to support those skills.

The way we design workplaces must change to meet the needs and demands of the business-people-technology interrelationship. However, the rules are changing fast. As designers, we frequently must forget some of what we know in order to move ahead.

Perhaps a thousand experiments on workplace design -- conducted by a wide variety of experts, including architects, engineers, furniture manufacturers, business consultants and teachers -- confirm these dynamics and support some common conclusions:

• The competition to succeed and exceed in today's international marketplace encourages innovative teamwork arrangements and better technological tools;
• Office employees often work in groups, rather than individually, to accomplish specific tasks;
• These work groups, which may or may not be physically located together, rely on technology to communicate, and to preserve their sense of group identity; and
• Individual workers depend much more heavily on technology to communicate, both professionally and socially.

Although most of these trends have been evolving over the past 20 years, resulting changes in workplace design have occurred in just the last few years, such as teleconferencing spaces, portable work stations, plug-and-play technologies, and others.

Productivity has played a role in this focus on design. In the office environment, the study of productivity connects results to several factors: the business structure or process, the people or culture, information and communications technology tools, and the built environment. On one hand, each of these components must be present to support desired results. On the other hand, when each of these elements is balanced and integrated, productivity and business results radically improve.

Designing "smart rooms" is key to optimizing computer connectivity in the workplace, according to Brad Barrett, president of the Georgia-based, high-tech firm Connect Center. A smart room combines low-profile cable floor systems with network-friendly office layouts that can easily be upgraded as technology advances. The rooms shown are examples of offices designed to maximize high-tech components in a shared work space. Computer-driven "white boards," data and video conference equipment and group collaboration software are now reaching broader markets, according to Barrett. Typically, the office use and layout are set before the room is "wired" to handle computer systems. Applying connectivity first, however, makes the room more flexible for adjustments later on.

Information Design is a new topic in many university programs. Many universities include computer display applications in their curricula, and multimedia has become a component of many communications arts programs.

Growing interest also is reflected in numerous conferences and organizations. For example, the international conference, "Media in Transition," that was recently held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, included, among the many topics covering media -- including copyright, social impacts, interactive tools, digital kids, and virtual places -- a report on MIT's "New Literacy Project" that promises to have great implications to the modern workplace environment.

That project combines the study of traditional media, such as text for books or newspaper, and new media, which includes combinations of still images, video, moving diagrams, audio and computer graphics. The intent in "meshing" the old and the new is to help students identify the strengths and weaknesses of each, since they frequently compete with one another to hold our attention.

Consider, for instance, competition among newspapers, radio, network television and cable to attract audiences and advertisers.

The MIT project shows that, as a new class of trained workers graduates from college with the skills to produce messages that grab our attention, and communicate them more efficiently, they will demand the tools to produce their messages and the resources to share them.

So we come full circle. Everywhere we turn, there is pressure to change, pressure to communicate, pressure to continue to improve technology, and pressure to support people within our business structure and at the places we work.

If we agree we must change what we build, we still must discover what to build. But we do not have those answers. Instead, we must change the way we plan our spaces so we can find the answers. Here are some guidelines:

• Toss out old notions of a technology budget. The old rules of thumb for establishing a fixed portion of a business budget (or project budget) for technology investment no longer works. Instead, technology must be procured to fill specific business needs. You cannot use another project's budget to estimate the budget for technology on the next project, or you may underfund this critical item.

• Forget past experience with conference rooms. In the past, the number of conference rooms appropriate for a floor of office space could be predicted, within reason, for each business type. Now, conference rooms are all about technology. The volume of conference space in an office project is driven by the need for specific technologies, such as PCs and individual videoconferencing or hot collections of technology tools to increase conference space and functions.

• Better yet, forget conference rooms. Explore new ways and new places for people to gather.

• Create balance. Our model for best business results means having elements in balance -- business structure, technology, people, and space -- so planning must balance design issues. If we fail to support some aspect of a business strategy, then we disable it. If we can find the best balance -- and if we have a reasonable business strategy -- we will win the game.

But these guidelines require us to throw out much of our past experience, even though this makes the task of designing new places more difficult. We'll need new concepts, new models, new methods and new rules. We'll need to be innovative and visionary in our approaches.

As the design and construction community invests in knowledge about technology, they are also investing in their own workplaces so they can help their clients make decisions that support their strategic goals. Then we can all drink our joe while it is still hot. Imagine that place.

Here are several places to find information and practical suggestions about the workplace:

• Future@Work is both an exhibit in downtown Seattle and a collective led by Callison Architecture, including consultants, vendors and contractors, who worked together to realize an image of the future workplace.

• Steelcase Inc. is a world-class designer and manufacturer of office furnishings. Steelcase Inc. collects and publishes research about the office environment.

• Steelcase's publications reference the American Productivity & Quality Center. This organization addresses several business concerns, including knowledge management, strategic planning, and productivity measurements.

• The Knowledge Capture Event is a series of conversations capturing workplace experience from many leading-edge experiments. Go to Space Architecture and enter "knowledge capture '99."

Douglas Bors is vice president of Technology Consulting and Research for Sparling, an electrical engineering and technology consulting firm in Seattle.

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