A Brief History of Workplace Design and Where it Might be Headed Next

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Many of us spend more time at our offices than ever before and sometimes see our colleagues more than our own families. Workplaces can be considered to be our second homes, which is why the way we deliberately design them in the present day has garnered so much attention. The overarching design of workplaces aims to create a perfect balance between heads-down focus work and layers of collaboration to improve the productivity and general well being of employees. As workplace trends come and go, there’s a new progression on everyone’s minds- and it predicts what a post-COVID-19 office might look like both in the immediate and long term future. Although there’s no crystal ball answer, many architecture firms, research groups, and real estate companies have been tapped to ideate and implement forward-thinking design solutions and health safety policies that will be critical in redefining how we utilize our workplaces for the years to come.

© Herman Miller

The 1960s was a period of prolific advancements in design, with the workplace being at the experimental forefront. Dismissing archaic ideas of endless rows of workstations, more democratic layouts that enhanced collaboration and socialization became the new standard. Later dubbed the Burolandschaft, a german office concept which roughly translates to “office landscape”, these workspaces placed emphasis on meeting the needs of the workforce instead of creating a formulaic “one size fits all” approach. Between this and the later developed Action Office concept, alternative seating options and workstations clustered together fostered many more social interactions that occurred between staff members of all levels. These two workplace models are often referenced when describing the original principles of modern office design.

Only twenty years later, large corporations completely flipped the switch on workplace design with the introduction of the cubicle and the “sell them cheap, stack them high” mindset. The sole focus on profitability at the expense of working comfortability was the driving force behind this shift towards this period of depressive office design. After nearly two decades of employees being trapped behind these desk walls, the emergence of new technology and the rediscovered desire to collaborate paved the way to our present-day pseudo-Burolandschaft-Action Office. 

Courtesy of DLR Group

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, some workplace design critics are predicting the return of the high walled cubicle mazes in order to enforce social distancing and calling for the death of the open office plan in favor of a permanent working from home solution. However, taking into consideration everything that designers have learned about workplace trends, human factors in design, and the potential for technology to impact where and how we work, many in the profession believe that the future of offices actually looks brighter than ever. The global pause caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has given designers the ability to reinvent workplaces by combining the best elements of the past with the promise of the future to give us healthier and more dynamic workplaces than we could have imagined before.

Courtesy of DLR Group

One of the main considerations regarding return to work strategies has been how to implement new policies and technology that will allow employees to continue to work remotely, and whether this decision will have an impact on individual workplaces and large scale real estate portfolios. With many companies saying that a portion of their staff will now have the option to work from home indefinitely, what does this mean for the future of collaboration and the spaces that facilitate those necessary interactions? B. Sanborn, Design Research Leader, and Jeremy Reding AIA, the Global Workplace Leader of DLR Group believe that one of the reasons working from home during the pandemic seems easy, is because everyone is forced to participate in this way of collaborating. However, the matter of working from home or working from the office is not binary, as it was never a black and white question of if you were in the office 100% of the time, or if you were not. Often, employees experience a hybrid sense of flexibility in where they can perform their jobs, and as companies slowly begin to return to the office, Sanborn and Reding say that employees might find that some of the old challenges of working remote may resurface. Those who are in the office will experience reclaimed opportunities for impromptu collaboration and will have the ability to be engaged by overhearing their co-workers discuss their daily tasks.