Anticipating permanent change
Last week we had the pleasure of a request from a leading global real estate organization to participate with them in the development of a workplace trends report, looking both 20 years back to assess where design has gone, and 20 years forward, to assess how design of the workplace should respond to other changes we might anticipate in society, technology, culture and the workplace.
These are always great assignments to have. They act as inflections in the normal course of business. They allow a short bit of time to stop and reflect and, in the reflection, to recalibrate.
One of the simple insights that came to us came to us as a result of the final question in all of these exercises, which is something on the order of, “Okay…and what should we do now?” This brought us back to an assessment of what we’ve been doing, and what we’ve been doing right over the past several years.
What I found uniquely fresh in this review was our belief that we are on the front edge of a future that will should radically reformulate what the/a “workplace” is. What I found uniquely surprising in this context is that the processes we’ve been developing over the past couple of years to define the context for design of the workplace provide a robust framework for meeting the challenges that have been emerging and that are becoming more visible now. We are preparing future posts for our work in other places discussing the subject of trends and the best-practice processes that can be used to day to prepare for any future.
