Construction Corner: What will the office of 2035 look like?

As employers seek greater productivity from their staff, new management systems are being tried that will change the interior spaces of many office buildings. The age of the cubicle is past. In its place we’re getting more and more variations on the idea of open-plan offices. With those variations will come a demand for more complex interior fit-ups to accommodate clients willing to spend more money to (they hope) make more money.

There has been a flood of articles during the last year in which architects, designers and researchers describe what they think the office of the near future will look like. Those opinions are based on what entrepreneurs are asking for now, and are also driven by developers of new technologies designed to make everyone more efficient.

Spurred by the widespread acceptance of social media like Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook by the millennial generation, the emphasis is likely to be on more collaboration, more flexible working hours, and more individual responsibility. Much of that will be achieved by closer electronic monitoring of the individual employee, including their health.

Closer monitoring inevitably means some loss of privacy, and that could be the dark side of the future. The bright side could be happier, healthier, more productive employees who enjoy their time at work, and are likely to stay with the company longer.

So what will the office of 2030 or 2035 look like?

Thanks to sensors and small motors, the office furniture could transform as the needs of workers change through the day.

A desk, for example, could expand to become a conference table. Walls could drop down from the ceiling to create a private meeting place. Then, when the meeting is over, the walls could retract, the conference table could divide itself into desks again restoring the original configuration.

One of the office espresso machines could be programmed to know which two teams need to collaborate on a project, arrange to get them together, then park itself close by to provide fresh espresso for all hands.

Chairs could be fitted with a cushion that uses sensors to track the sitter’s heart rate, posture, breathing and other vital signs. An accompanying smartphone app would remind the sitter to take a break or stand for a while. One such cushion, Darma, is already on the market.

Office furniture designers are already marketing privacy pods — small spaces that provide individual employees with a work surface, a lounge-style chair and footstool, all enclosed by a wrap-around privacy screen when they need to get away and work. One such space is the Brody Worklounge, from Steelcase.

Many open-plan offices already pipe white noise into the space to provide privacy and minimize distractions. But researchers have found that people prefer the sound of flowing water. The sound of a bubbling brook beats white noise any day.

Amazon, the huge online retailer, is leading the charge in free-form office space. Its new headquarters in Seattle will have three biospheres, greenhouse-like domes filled with plants and five storeys of flexible work areas. Google wanted to build a new headquarters that would have included indoor bike paths, lots of plants and a translucent roof. Those plans fell through when LinkedIn acquired much of the land that Google had wanted.

The point in all this is that in many small ways, scarcely visible to outsiders, office buildings will become more complex structures, capable of many things today’s buildings can’t do — accommodate retractable walls, for example. Electrical and mechanical systems will be more complex.

Interior fit-ups will become more specialized because of all the possible configurations needed for the office of the future. Gone will be the cubicles. Gone will be the open-plan with its lack of privacy. In their place will be, instead, an office that is whatever the occupants want it to be.

Korky Koroluk is a regular freelance contributor to the Journal of Commerce. Send comments or questions to editor@journalofcommerce.com.