Office

Maybe this is news to precisely no one, but it’s just occurred to me that today’s offices would be completely unrecognisable to someone from a century ago. According to my calculations, that means the offices of 100 years from now – assuming we’re still around by then – will be completely different again. 

Why? Because of technology. Just as our predecessors in the twentieth century couldn’t have anticipated the demise of paper-based offices, we surely can’t imagine what types of devices people will be working from in the future. Like, there might not even be computers in 3020, at least not in the way we know them today. Maybe they’ll be, like, composed of swarms of hovering nanobots. Who can say?

I have some ideas in mind, but I’m no office design expert. Melbourne industrial design nerds, do you have any thoughts to share? Will we have weightless workstations that combat the sedentary nature of desk work? Will we cordlessly interface our brains to some kind of cloud-based neuro pool? Or will the whole concept of an office simply be defunct, now that AI can do information-based work better than us?

Here in Melbourne, office space fitouts may already be anticipating the future. I mean, when was the last time you saw a USB in use? Everything’s on the cloud now. Some people at my office don’t even have a computer; they just make garbled voice notes into their phones and some kind of wizardry files it in a coherent manner. Either that, or they’re being paid to mumble a bunch of mumbo-jumbo into the ether. It’s hard to tell.

One thing I could really go for is sound-bubble technology. Anyone who works in an office will surely know what I’m talking about. It’s an invisible bubble that hovers around you like a force field, and blocks incoming sounds from the environment – unless, like, someone wants to speak to you, in which case they just do a voice command to unlock sonic access.

I’m sure there’s a science to office design, but I can’t for the life of me figure it out. As someone who’s worked across seven different offices in as many years (yeah, I realise that doesn’t look good on my resume), I’m better positioned than most to have gained some insights into this. And yet, here I am, none the wiser. 

There just seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. You’d think there was a unified agenda, the way the internet goes on about office design trends, Sydney offices taking the world by storm with some hot new concept, open plan layouts being dead and so on and so forth. Rest assured, there’s no agenda – it’s every office for itself. Or so it seems to me. 

I mean, there’s enough of a semblance of order to fool the average Joe into thinking there are cohesive advancements going on in office interiors. We’re moving into a more technologically integrated age that offers more work-life flexibility than ever, we’re doing things more collaboratively, performance is driven by design… you know the drill. Maybe there is something to all that, but from what I can tell, things are just as chaotic as they’ve ever been in the realm of commercial work environments. 

Just ask any of the big commercial fitout companies. Sydney businesses like to think of themselves as leaders of a cutting-edge charge, whatever that may be in a given moment, but at the end of the day you’ve got to come back to the essentials. I’m talking furniture, windows, lighting, power. Whatever you add to that, in my view, is just bling. That can be nice, but it’s never going to have a game-changing impact on… things. 

Not to say that office design doesn’t play any role in how performance and efficiency play out in a space. I’m certain that it does. My point is more that businesses seem to get hung up on how it can position them at the front of some hot new cultural movement, which doesn’t even exist.

I seriously hope our office can just pick a style and stay with it. It’s been two years, and we’ve had FIVE styles. Things are getting to the point where I expected to come into work one day and find out that we’ve gone from regular office block to some sort of elegant tower or underground bunker, because the boss just can’t figure out what makes everything run more efficiently.

I mean, the business going so well is the reason we’re able to call in the Melbourne based office fitout companies so often, but it needs to stop at some point. We started with regular cubicles, but then they were all torn out because “open plan offices are the future!”, but after a couple of months of that, all the cubicles are back because “you guys talk too much!” and then a couple of months after that they were gone again because “social interaction is the key to a healthy working environment, I saw it on the discovery channel.”

Yeah, alright. Except then the cubicles were back again, now in frosted glass form, because “open plan offices encourage the spread of germs, and sick days are a drain on company resources.” I mean, maybe. I didn’t think we were that unhealthy as an office, but apparently there was an incoming plague, and we have all been saved, yay. So it’s all frosted glass now, and the meeting room is full of purple bean bags because “it lets the clients know that we’re fun, hip and with it.” Also, the kitchen, which is now a communal space filled with…bean bags. It’s really hard to get up from those things, sometimes.

I honestly don’t think looking around Melbourne for the best office designers is really our problem. We just do way too much re-branding. We need to find a style, find a brand, find a look…and run with it. Build upon it, even. But not make an entirely different look every two months.

-Grace