Take Advantage of the Technology (1:09)
I do not believe that we are leveraging technology nearly as much as we should be in the built environment and that the auto industry is kicking our butt right now. My neighbors have a car where they can start the car inside their house and get it nice and warm. They can walk down to the car. They don’t even have to touch it. It automatically unlocks because the fob in their pocket sinks with the door. They get in the car and it knows which driver it is, and everything automatically adjusts to that driver. The music, the temperature, the lighting, the position of the seat, the position of the mirrors and the steering column and the phone syncs with the dashboard. You get to the office, you walk in the front door and you start crawling around on the floor trying to find an outlet. Right? Offices are not merely leveraging technology to the extent that they should for a variety of reasons.
Number one, it’s a lot more complex than just an individual car. Number two, I think most companies are nervous about the investment that they’re making in technology because it’s evolving so quickly that they don’t want to buy something or commit to something that then becomes obsolete a year later. And so they’re hesitant and they’re hedging their bets, but that procrastination is just kind of putting them farther and farther behind. And then I think the third thing is designers aren’t leaning in enough to technology. In many cases, we’re designing spaces without consulting with AV and IT. And if we position the rooms wrong, if we proportion them wrong, if they’re not the right width, if they’re not the right, we don’t have the right height. If they’re positioned with two glass windows right across from each other and now you’ve got these cameras that are anybody that walks by, it’s picking up or picking up the room to the next room, then we’re going to create bad solutions. And I think as designers, we need to absolutely lean in sooner. We need to bring the expertise to the table much more quickly and really be much more purposeful and focused on creating spaces that are tech enhanced.
Predictions Versus Reality (03:24)
Science fiction typically projects what’s going to happen in the future, and most of the technology they actually got right? If you think about Star Trek or the Jetson, they predicted a lot of that pretty accurately, quite frankly. What they totally failed on was the social dynamics, and that’s I think the thing that we need to think about a little bit more. And I think they also created environments that were very cold and sterile, but what we find in our researchers, the more high tech we go, the more high touch we want those spaces to be, because we balance things out and we are organic beings and we don’t want to live in these cold, sterile environments. And so all those elements of hospitality and infusing with biophilia and more organic spaces and spaces that are richer in FF&E, I really believe that that’s all that kind of high tech, high touch balance to make sure that these spaces are still designed for people, even if they are tech enabled.
Making Better Decisions (4:35)
We have an obligation to really have a much deeper understanding about why is something happening and what is the real reason behind that so that we can make better decisions. Because I think a lot of people are going to make some really bad decisions based on thin data that isn’t really telling you the whole story. And so we need to focus on more robust data and we need to standardize this because things are not being reported equally across the industry. We don’t even call things the same thing, right? Our industry just is really lacking in any kind of oversight on terminology and on how do you put things in so you get the right stuff out. We need to get better on that.
People Are Different (05:25)
What we’ve tried to do over the last 40 years is trying to create the average space for the average person. Who is that person and who are we designing for? But the thing is that I don’t think that exists anymore. We need to understand that people are different. What people do is different and that it’s messy. And trying to design the average space for the average person, you’re basically missing 80% of the people and you’re probably only serving about 20%. So we need to embrace the complexity of this, and I think giving people options, choices and some kind of control is important. I think we’re at a really interesting time in history where it is not the workplace that is the only thing that is changing. Work is changing. Where we do it. When we do it. How long we do it for. All those things are in question and we need to really dive into some of those things a little bit more holistically to come up with better answers. Then we can design the spaces that will support what we want.
Common Shared Space (06:36)
If you had a dozen floors, you probably had a dozen medium to large conference rooms that were grossly underutilized, but cost a lot of money to build out because everybody felt like they needed one. And so I think what’s happening now is we’ve shifted from I have to own it, to I have to be able to access it and I want to be able to give my people access to other things. Maybe it’s a great communal gym that’s in the building, or maybe it’s a communal conference room, or maybe you’re in a precinct with four or five buildings and one has a mall, one has a great food center, another one has a great conferencing space, and another one has an educational something; where you can share amongst yourselves. You don’t have to own everything. You just have to have access to it.
Designing for Connection (07:23)
We so quickly decided as a society that remote learning was a disaster. Those students probably lost at least two years of academic advancement and they were stunted socially. Yet we haven’t equated that to young emerging professionals coming into the workplace and what it’s potentially done for them. And I think it’s fascinating that most conferences tried in the beginning to have hybrid versions, but almost all of them have nixed that element. It’s like you’re either there or not. Hybrid is hard. It is really hard, and it’s hard when you don’t know people really, really well. If you’re connecting with people that you knew well, then it’s easier to connect virtually. But if you’re meeting with people that you may not know as well, you’re meeting for the first time, there’s all kinds of things about just our body language and the connections and what you will or won’t say that it’s very different when you’re in person. And so I think that the office is an opportunity for people to physically come together. You don’t have to do that five days a week, by the way, but it’s an opportunity to do that. Now if you’re still designing it as a place that you are going to do heads down, individual work, there is an element of that that still has to happen. But I think we also need to focus on if you’re coming to the office to connect, are we designing spaces that allow people to do that?
Pushing the Envelope (08:55)
I think there’s some big things that as an industry we really need to grapple with. We really need to lean in much, much harder and get beyond just being sustainable. We need to look at regeneration and giving back. We need to really lean into what we’re being afforded right now, which is the opportunity to test and to do some trials. Because in North America, the mantra has always been, we’re going to do this once every 10 years. We’re going to spend a lot of money. Don’t screw it up. But in other places of the world, they flip their space more often, and so they experiment a little bit more and they can be a little bit bolder. And so if we are now being given an opportunity to test and experiment, then by all means take advantage of that.
Change is here to stay. This is not an incremental thing. It is going to be constant, and we are going to have to embrace this, which means that we need to change the way that we think. I’m incredibly nervous that this might be our industry’s Kodak moment where we know people can’t get in and out of space as quickly as they want to. It’s not real meeting their needs. It’s not as flexible as they want it to be. We’re not really truly integrating technology. It’s not as sustainable as it could be. People aren’t thriving. People don’t want to be there yet. We’re not changing the way that we’re approaching this and I think we fundamentally are ripe for disruption. And we can either do it to ourselves and shake things up, or we can try to go back to the way it’s always been and have somebody disrupt it for us.
Typically, most companies do a project once every 10 years, sign a 10-year lease, they do it once and then, okay, we’re done. We’re not going to touch that space again for 10 years. But in that 10 years, the workforce is changing every five years. The company’s missions are changing every three years, but if the workplace, it only changes once every 10 years, it’s then guaranteed to be out of date, a large percentage of its life because everything else has evolved or changed and it hasn’t. And so the whole way that we’re approaching this is setting us up for failure. And we need to think about what are the cycles of our leases and how do we fund our projects so that there’s built-in refresh so they’re not falling so out of whack with everything else that we have to undertake these massive efforts to try to get them back to where they should be. And these huge change management initiatives. I mean, if change is constant, then we just need to embrace that there’s always going to be things that we’re going to have to be tweaking or evolving. And the whole cycle of how we approach this has to change.
New Business Models (11:50)
We’ve been talking about furniture membership and IT and AV membership models probably for 10 years, and it just hasn’t caught on because it’s not the way we’ve always done it. That’s the mantra. And I kind of feel like I’m old enough to remember when Demountable Partitions came out and it took years for them to kind of take off because, well, that’s not the way we’ve always done it. We build walls and that’s how we make money and so I think we just need to have some people that are a little bolder, that are out of the box thinkers that are willing to try some things and to say, I actually don’t really want to own furniture because the second I buy it, then it starts to become obsolete and it’s going to ugly out before it wears out, and then I’m stuck with that stuff forever versus something where I’m paying a monthly or yearly fee for you to manage it.
But if something doesn’t work, get it out of here and put something in that does, and I can flip it and I can change it, and I can refresh it, and I can have you deal with afterlife and all of those things. We need to think about it. I mean, it’s insane to me how, if you think about this, when you move into a house, you don’t just gut the house and throw everything that you had and was in the house away. You probably start with what’s there yet. Every commercial real estate project, that’s what we do. Get rid of all the stuff we had, get rid of the space that we had, gut the new space that we’re moving into and start from scratch. And it is just from a sustainability, from a timing, from a cost, from an environmental standpoint, it just is so wrong. And I think we need to really rethink some innovative things. We need to get some people together and say, how can we make this process better, faster, quicker, more sustainable, and more environmentally friendly, and really empower companies to have better options to get where we need to be?
