Internet Shop, McLeodganj, Himanchal Pradesh, India
How many of you are most effective at your desk at the office? Why?
What is the best place for you to communicate with the people you work with? Do you need to be physical proximity?
At one time working from home was a big change in the flexibility of our notions of how and where work can be done. But no longer is the choice simply between working from home and the office. Our workspaces have expanded into the public domain, to third-places such as coffee shops, public libraries and even bars.
At the same time, co-working establishments have sprung up to re-create the office infrastructure and interactions for freelancers, consultants and “working vagabonds”, albeit with a vastly different office environment than traditional, single company locations.
Is this flexibility and physical nomadity possible for all types of work? Obviously no, and for most people and organizations, not even all of the time.
The broader questions are around the next wave of cultural, technology and design shifts. If traditional third-places, the refuges from home and work, are inundated with people busily working, will a new type of third-place emerge? Will we see coffee shops requiring people to turn cell phones off, or to not use computers? Will floor layout, power plug accessibility, and table layout change to either restrict workers or segment workers to a different section of the place? Will coffee shops and other public lounges begin to differentiate, market themselves as purely relaxing places? Why do we even work at coffee shops anyway?
Do we want to go to public places to interact or merely to exist in a public environment, curled up in our own worlds accessed via our laptop, phone and internet connection? Or will we move more towards co-working establishments, places more defined as work environments, drawing similar crowds of like-minded and supporting people?
Does everybody want to hang out in places where people are working? Since the nomad’s working day no longer stops when they leave the office, how does one relax in environments where people are busily working? Can we relax in the same way in these shared places, or do we need to completely escape to ease the guilt?
What other services and features will be created to increase (or decrease) the productivity in public workspaces? Do people want to engage with each other in public workspaces? Will will see hyper-local and short-lived online social networks emerge to serve these temporary, physically proximate groups?
Broadly, public places have adapted to become places for work, adding infrastructure, services and products to offer the basic facilities for nomadic workers, which has altered the social nature of our public spaces. Flexible and nomadic workers an atmosphere of work and commerce through their buzz of activity, an externality and an imposition on the social rights of people sharing these public spaces.
Will we begin to see a backlash in social acceptance of “public work”? Perhaps as culture and society adapts we may begin to see a more defined segmentation of where and when it is acceptable to work publicly. The broader questions are 1) how we as a society want to use public spaces and if we want to segment our activities, and 2) if public spaces need to adapt, compartmentalize or combine their spaces, services and products to meet the confusingly divergent yet overlapping customer needs of relaxing, socializing and working.
We are still in the early stages of understanding the ever-shifting nature of work and the meaning of “flexible work”, and I am looking forward to seeing how culture and technology adapts to and creates our notions of how we define work in our lives.
