How Can We Design a Better Office Typology?

As researchers and designers, we engaged in a design study exercise to imagine what a typical corporate organization would look like if a conventional headquarters was redistributed to a networked series of nodes throughout a city or geographic region at different scales. What would this new model entail? How could it improve city life? And how would those changes help organizations?

We argue that distributing workers throughout the city or region into smaller workspaces and giving them the chance to collaborate more with colleagues who live in close proximity could create several benefits.

From a resilience perspective, this model offers more options from where people can work in the event of disruptions like a natural disaster, a power outage, compromised infrastructure, or a major traffic disruption. From a business development perspective, it can bring organizations closer to their clients or customers — even offering options for co-locating with them. It can also bring businesses closer to job seekers or other talent pools.

Some large financial services companies based in New York’s financial district have, for instance, recently opened spaces for software and other tech-related operations closer to the city’s start-up community as a way to connect with it. This was the strategy behind Capital One Labs’ New York space, which is located away from Wall Street, in the heart of the Flatiron District. The space has helped them foster connections with the nearby tech community and attract talent.

In addition, a widespread organizational shift from offices that occupy large floors in a single building to a series of distributed nodes throughout multiple locations would result in more mixed-use office buildings that serve a more diverse cross-section of workers. We argue that this new typology would facilitate more high-quality connections, essential for strengthening existing teams and creating new relationships within and among organizations.

What Would These Offices Look Like?

One of the biggest changes to impact corporate real estate over the last decade has been the emergence and growth of coworking spaces, which provide smaller and more flexible shared office spaces with short-term leases to individuals and organizations. The total number of coworking spaces is growing, but it still represents only a small fraction of corporate work spaces. (There are about 22,000 coworking spaces worldwide, serving about two million workers.) We argue that coworking-like options are an exemplary model for what a more distributed network of workspaces could look like.

One challenge of the traditional centralized office is that interpersonal communication across floors and buildings is seldom. We tend to communicate most with those who are within six feet of us. Subdividing urban office buildings into smaller work units for multiple businesses, with shared amenities, would help solve this problem. More public-facing spaces would make the office more inviting by allowing people to interact and build relationships across units, or retreat to private work areas at their will.

In addition, mixing business offices with amenities such as event spaces, restaurants, and gyms within commercial buildings would allow these sectors to complement rather than compete with one another. For example, bars could be placed at rooftop level to take advantage of a building’s views while fitness spaces could be located on a mezzanine or at mid-level to take advantage of larger floor areas. This idea of thoughtfully distributing spaces and services throughout one slice of real estate borrows from a strategy that has been used by the hospitality industry over the past decade. Hotels combine destination services like coworking space with retail, coffee shops, and themed dining venues to attract visitors and locals alike. This, in turn, increases the attractiveness of certain neighborhoods to businesses offering complementary services.

Such adaptive reuse strategies can change the character of urban neighborhoods, which has been the case in places like Downtown Los Angeles, the far West Side of Manhattan, and Downtown Detroit. In each of these areas, commercial vacancies have decreased and the number of housing units has increased. We imagine an urban future where these changes offer services, housing, and jobs for people across the income spectrum so that cities ultimately do more to support people in an equitable way.

What Technologies Will These Spaces Require?

Even with clusters of people working together across a network of locations, the need to collaborate virtually will remain. The traditional, centralized office consists of meeting rooms of various sizes and capacities. In this model, someone dialing in virtually is at a disadvantage compared to their colleagues assembled in the same room. The remote worker presents as a voice on the phone or a window on a screen.

However, the pandemic has now neutralized virtual meetings. Everyone appears equally as a window on a screen. In the future, we imagine organizing meetings in a similar manner, using immersive technology to connect co-located clusters of participants more seamlessly and equitably with co-located clusters of their colleagues. A key feature of the decentralized office could be a hybrid conference room or broadcast center with virtual reality/augmented reality technology. (Figure 3).