11: Finalising the brief

So in slowly coming to terms with what I foresee happening in the future, I have to re-establish my brief. The way we work today, is that most people commute to-and-from work, which is incredibly wasteful - some people (like myself) travel 3 hours every day to get to and from work, which equals 15 hours every week, or 780 hours every year (that's 32.5 DAYS - almost 10% of the year...wow. This is making me super happy that I'm moving to New Farm next month!)

Most people will therefore transition to the 'working from home' category over the next few decades, cutting out the wasted time, money and resources. However when working from home, people miss out on the very important element of human interaction - most ideas are formed when discussing them with others in informal environments, like brain storming or using people as sound boards. I propose then that in the future, people can still have the convenience of working at home, but are encouraged to meet at work, perhaps at least once a week. This integration of work environments would help foster trust, respect and productivity.

The way this may work, is that all work content would be saved to the 'cloud', a practice that is becoming more widespread and commonplace today, and will probably be the norm in the future. People will continue to do the future's alternative to video conferencing (holographic conference?), and then able to access everything when they go into work.

When going in to work, people would need to 'check in' to a desk - the office environment will be set up with hundreds (depending on the size of the company) of transitional desks that can be personalised when people dock their personal electronic devices (or PEDs).

To encourage people to engage in the work place, meeting spaces would need to be exciting, engaging and interactive - like those at Google or other social work environments used as exemplars in a previous blog post.

This interactive and collaborative persona can be extended to the facade of the building, with social zones and media surfaces communicating with people outside the building, giving the feeling of transparency and openness to the companies. This could create a wonderful exemplar on how businesses (and cities) should be run in the future.