RIBAJ: Why the office needs an overhaul

RIBA Journal – the house magazine of the Royal Institute of British Architects – quoted me in the new issue on the subject of office design:

Meanwhile, the ongoing march of technology will impose new space and infrastructure requirements, enabling offices to function more intelligently, monitoring and controlling functions such as ambient temperature, security systems, lighting, fire and life safety systems intuitively in real time.

Architects will have to adapt to meet the challenges of this brave new world, says Greg Lindsay, a workplace design expert and author: ‘I find it fascinating that there is a litany of business literature about the importance of disruption to working patterns to improve creativity and productivity, by changing teams, altering their food and environment etc, yet we still work in offices that are designed once and typically last 10 years or more without a refresh.’

He adds: ‘Workplace design today reflects the formal hierarchies of how work is supposedly done, yet we know from studies that work actually gets done in an informal, less structured way. The question for architects designing the offices of the future is: how do you do a better job of reflecting that, rather than struggling against it by producing the same pointless buildings over and over again?’

Read the entire thing here.