What Will Our Offices Look Like?

By Daniel Eisenberg

What in the hell was Bob Propst thinking? It's a reasonable question to ask as you survey the cramped confines of your standard-issue corporate cubicle and bathe in the dull glow of overhead fluorescent lights, all the while trying to ignore the sound of your colleagues' clipping their fingernails or blathering away on a speakerphone.

Propst is the guy who, three decades ago, dreamed up these modular boxes for furniture giant Herman Miller. As he envisioned it, the system of wafer-thin, movable walls would be a revolutionary tool that would break down rigid hierarchies, spur creativity and free work spaces from the shackles of uniformity. Unfortunately, he didn't count on the square-foot police. Those FORTUNE 500 facility managers arrested his innovation and reformed it into an impersonal, white-collar assembly line, one that can make a genuine gearhead long for the good, old days of windowless offices and rotary phones.

With that record of innovation, workers are a bit skeptical about the office of the future. What will the geniuses in real estate come up with in the next quarter-century? If current trends are any indication, hide. Consider "hoteling," the latest workplace experiment, which treats employees as though they were visiting nomads who are assigned a phone and portable desk by a concierge. Or perhaps the "head cubicle," as imagined by Dilbert creator Scott Adams, a square helmet that will let CEOs "stack us up like firewood in a warehouse on the outskirts of town, where rents are low."

Millions of telecommuters, of course, don't intend to wait for such an outcome. They have already set up quarters wherever they set down their laptops. "Today's office is an aging concept, 150 years old, that people have been hanging on to," argues Stevan Alburty, who runs WorkVirtual, an office-consulting shop. It's only a matter of time, telecommuting true believers claim, before city skyscrapers and suburban office parks are abandoned altogether, left as archaeological curiosities for future generations.

Well, don't start your dig just yet. PCs may be great for solitary pursuits, composing Powerpoint presentations or writing. But as long as co-workers need to brainstorm, bat around ideas and just plain gossip, they will always return to the water cooler, choosing a little face-to-face time over e-mail and the Web. Says Christine Albertini, vice president of advanced concepts at office-furniture maker Steelcase: "The basic nature of work is social."

Clueless corporations, which have typically approached the office as a storage site for people and paper, are only just starting to think outside the cubicle, imagining work spaces that foster interaction, not isolation. By 2025, though, the standard-issue, gloomy maze of hallways and bullpens of today may well be replaced--once they have been fully depreciated, that is--by a wide range of office setups that, just like the new economy, stress customization over mass appeal. In this newfangled, dynamic working environment, employees should be able to personalize their work spaces and constantly reconfigure their surroundings to suit the changing needs of business.

"Think of the buildings as stage sets, where you can play out any technological or organizational scheme," muses Volker Hartkopf, professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University.

So what might this workers' paradise look and feel like? Well, for starters, technology will be "invisible but unavoidable," as Bob Arko of industrial designer IDEO puts it. The tangled cables that snake through every office, for instance, should disappear, replaced by wireless systems that zap voice, data and video through the air. Smart materials could make any surface or gadget feel like wood one day and metal the next. Intelligent chairs might conform perfectly to your posture, giving you a much needed back rub in the process. Embedded systems and biometric, body-sensing technology will enable every piece of hardware, from cell phones and PDAs to PCs, to know exactly who you are and where, as well as to communicate with every other piece.

"You'll walk into the building like you own the place," says Mark Smith, manager of appliance platforms at H-P Labs. When you arrive at work, you could simply stroll through a secure, smart door and listen as your desktop virtual assistant reads aloud your schedule for the day. The temperature and lighting will adjust automatically to your preferences. Though we probably won't attain the mythical paperless office, there will likely be less of the messy stuff lying about, thanks to high-tech, rewritable parchment. And forget about typing: sophisticated voice recognition will let you tell your PC what to do (though all that yakking could just as easily make you hoarse).

The harsh right angles and rigid grid layout so despised by hapless cubicle-ites are also likely to vanish. In their place, workers might find themselves in a tentlike structure with a retractable roof, pitched right in the middle of a vast, open commons area. Screens stretching from poles could shift from transparent to opaque, depending on your mood and need for privacy. Don't worry about the noise from your next-door neighbor; acoustics technology can block that out. And don't fret about fighting for a windowed office either; with walls of flat-screen monitors raining down images and data from all directions, you will be able to enjoy any number of stunning virtual views from your cockpit. To chat with a co-worker a continent away, just call him or her on a lifelike, 3-D video-conferencing system. If you need to get busy on a project with a few of your colleagues, simply fold up your movable workstation and roll over to them. You won't have to knock. "We'll blur the line between furniture and technology," says Rick Duffy, director of the knowledge-resource group at Herman Miller. "Instead of building walls of metal and wood, what if they inflated with air or water?"

We won't hold our breath for that one. Just as important as personal space, though, will be group space. Rather than a couple of conference rooms decked out with imposing mahogany tables, picture multiple areas for groups to convene and collaborate--from indoor gardens, playgrounds and cafes to what designers term contemplative caves. Even the lowly office kitchenette might be wired by 2025. Say you're having a spirited debate with a colleague about a pitch to a prospective client just as you're grabbing a cup of joe. By 2025, according to John Seely, director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, you should be able to expand the conversation right there on digital whiteboards that line the walls and then have your ideas instantly e-mailed to your computer.

The boss, mind you, will probably be clued in to your little chat as well. Privacy, as we all know well, is rapidly eroding in the workplace, and the situation only stands to get worse. From reading employees' e-mail to tracking their Web surfing, more corporations are keeping a close eye on their human capital. In another quarter-century, we will probably be forced to carry badges that let our superiors know where we are at all times, from the bathroom to the vending machines. Then again, crafty folks who want to spend the day at the movies might just fashion counterfeit badges and have colleagues pass them around to throw security off the trail. "It could be the greatest boon to goofing off ever," says Adams. After all, as Bob Propst learned when he tried to build the flexible office more than 30 years ago, workplace innovations don't always work out as planned.