Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has inevitably influenced the way people work and the physical places in which they work. Water power dictated where mills and early factories would be placed. Steam power enabled a significant increase in the scale of industrial production. By concentrating workers in factories, new technologies for power made possible the mass produced consumer-based society we know of today. But the impacts of new technology have not always been positive. Mass production ended the individualized, high quality, artisan-led cottage industries. And few of us would be willing to work in the dirty, poorly lit, and unventilated factories and crowded industrial cities of the middle and late 19th Century [Tenner 1996].
The rise of electricity and telecommunications infrastructures over the last century has enabled the emergence of the modern workplace, characterized by office buildings supporting centralized and hierarchical work organizations. The latest computing and communications developments, such as the Internet, computer networking, wireless communications, and portable computing, are having significant impacts on the nature and location of work. As a recent Business Week article indicates, new technologies are enabling work from home, on the road, and decoupled from the conventional office and the traditional workplace [Business Week 1996]. Furthermore, the increasing sophistication of information technology coupled with its rapidly falling costs are making possible ever "smarter" buildings with increased capabilities for customizing the workplace to the needs of the work. We are coming full circle from the dawn of the Industrial Age to a new Post-Industrial Age, that enables a return to the "cottage" and greater personalization of the workplace [NRC 1994].
Organizational structures, information technologies, and physical spaces mutually influence each other, imposing new constraints and requirements, and suggesting new opportunities for enhancing worker and organizational productivity. For example, many existing physical environments are thought to be inadequate for today's dynamic organizations, with their greater demands for placing information technology in the hands of individual workers, the dispersion of work away from traditional centralized offices through such developments as telecommuting and "hoteling" (the elimination of traditional, dedicated office locations for workers to encourage them to spend more time with customers). Some organizations now express the desire to rapidly reorganize and restructure their physical spaces to enhance teamwork and meet immediate work demands. Yet the economics of replacing existing structures with wholly new ones is daunting, and so new technologies are especially desirable if they can be retrofitted into existing spaces, replacing existing infrastructures to support change.
Information technology, in the form of internetworked computers and information displays, imposes new workplace demands for power, lighting, window design, environmental controls, and so on. Yet it also enables more sophisticated building controls systems. For example, Johnson Control's Personal Environment Module [Business Week 1996] enables an individual worker to control the temperature, fresh air, and noise level in and around his or her workstation. It is generally believed that a more comfortable work environment leads to a more effective and productive one.
A continuing challenge is to develop design methodologies for buildings (and to convince building owners to consider life cycle costs rather than first costs) so that buildings may evolve over their lifetime to support new technologies and new user demands. Buildings are designed for decades, but a generation of information technology is measured in a few months or years. Many buildings constructed over 25 years ago have inadequate power to support a computer on every worker's desk. The prevalent computing model of the time was based on centralized computing services, located in basement machine rooms. Local area networking technology had not yet been invented, and of course, these buildings were not designed to support ubiquitous data networking. Retrofitting existing buildings for data networking is an expensive proposition, hence the interest in exploiting wireless networks. The same can be said of reorganizing physical spaces within buildings, such as moving walls or utility infrastructures within existing buildings.
Contrast this situation with a modern engineering research building like the new computer science building at the University of California, Berkeley--Soda Hall . This building has communications and power support for up to eight workstation-sized computers per office (and even this has proven to be inadequate in some offices!). The entire building was designed around a high performance data communications infrastructure bringing high speed networking capabilities to virtually every corner of the building, with easy access to communications closets with adequate space and conduit to grow with users' demands. Yet even this building was not designed to support rapid reconfiguration of physical spaces. It still embodies a rather conventional plan of private offices and dedicated laboratory and teaching spaces. Knocking down walls and moving lighting, ventilation, and communications infrastructures remains an expensive and time consuming proposition.
The desire for such capabilities in buildings is not limited to universities. An advertisement for the World Trade Center in the Sunday New York Times, 1 December 1996, states the following:
"In 4 or 5 years, your business may plug into 21st Century technology. But why wait? (It's already at the World Trade Center.) Take power, for example. Most properties supply their tenants with only 3.5 watts per square foot. We can offer up to 10 watts per square foot, plus all the cooling and backup they need for their employees and equipment.
Communications? Fiber optic services from four major communications carriers, as well as basic and premium cable TV and direct satellite access are already in place. We've worked very hard to anticipate and make available the advanced technology our tenants need to conduct business."
It is our premise that the accelerating evolution of the Information Age, and its underlying technologies for information processing and communications, is likely to have the kinds of revolutionary implications for the workplace as steam power had in the 19th Century and electrical power had in the 20th. For knowledge-based workers at the high end, where it is easy to justify significant capital investments, the new workplace will be characterized by enhanced support for group work, such as the introduction of videoconferencing, tools for asynchronous collaboration like electronic mail and group planning software, and increased support for telecommuting and remote work. An open question is how these same technologies will be applied to make other kinds of workers more productive. In addition, information technology integrated with building systems will enable the rise of buildings that "think," able to anticipate the demand for services by tracking occupant location and learning their preferences. As organizational structures become more dynamic, the demand for rapid reconfiguration of workspaces and reorganization of work groups will increase, thus requiring building technologies to evolve to support more reconfigurable physical spaces with the ability to adapt building systems as organizations change.
Furniture and facilities planners are already considering how to design environments that simultaneously support commons areas for intensive collaboration while still providing private spaces for reflection and task accomplishment. An example is Steelcase's Personal Harbors , an integrated individual workstation that can be closed for privacy or opened to a commons area to encourage group collaboration. The harbor contains sound baffling, adjustable work surfaces, translucent window panels, lockable filing cabinets, fan controls, light dimmers, even a CD player. This new plan for workspaces is sometimes called "caves and commons" work areas, that is, office floorplans that encompass small personal spaces with larger shared areas for meetings and brainstorming. Their effect on worker productivity remains unclear, and is worthy of intensive study [Business Week 1996].
To better understand how workers could be made more effective in individual and group tasks by the appropriate exploitation of information and building technologies, we convened a two day "by invitation only" workshop at the Xerox Document University in Leesburg, VA. We drew on an interdisciplinary collection of experts in (1) communications technologies, (2) building technologies and architecture, (3) user centered system design, and (4) facility planning. Our goal was to learn from each other about the latest trends and developments in communications, computer-supported collaborative work, building systems and the design of flexible workplaces, and facilities planning and standardization for the 21st Century workplace. We sought to identify innovative and high impact research opportunities at the intersection of these diverse disciplines. This report represents the primary output of the workshop: a set of research recommendations focusing on the interaction of how people will work and where people will work in the future.
Last updated by Randy H. Katz, 22 January 1997