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This approach gave rise to the principles of scientific management and efficiency developed by the American intellectual engineer Frederick Taylor. In turn, these principles were applied to the growing numbers of offices that began to develop from the late 19th century. With male-dominated hierarchical structures, and with women being allocated very defined and limited roles such as typing or bookkeeping, these were far from the ‘agile’, activity-centred workplaces we see emerging today. These were offices whose shape and layout reflected workplace hierarchies, and little changed for close to a hundred years.
By contrast, the design of offices today is less about the connections between physical resources and machines and more about connections between people and knowledge. The trend for hierarchy and uniformity is being reversed in favour of a more horizontal pattern of autonomy and collaboration. We also no longer have to be in the same place, or even time zone, as our co-workers thanks to mobile communications and information technology. This atomisation of the workforce means new ways of interaction have had to develop, based on trust, common purpose and citizenship.
That at least is the theory. The majority of large companies still adhere to the old conventions – think acres of office space interspersed with rows of cabinets for storing paper. But a flexible, more agile vision of the workplace is emerging in recent projects, such as the new BBC Media City in Manchester by ID-SR (Sheppard Robson) or the Sydney HQ for the Macquarie Group by Clive Wilkinson and Woods
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Bagot. Ironically, while the visions being expressed in these projects may appear revolutionary, for those who are engaged in the design of workplaces or the management of corporate change many of the ideas that appear to be new are actually very familiar. It is just that they have taken decades to come to fruition. They originated in the theories of Peter Drucker, who coined the term ‘knowledge worker’ in the 1950s, and from works by the economist and writer Charles Handy in the 1980s and 1990s. But it is only in the past few years that we have begun to see many of the conventions and assumptions of the Industrial Age being challenged and the concept of new ways of working finally becoming viable, thanks to a combination of social change, the economy and the ubiquity of IT and mobile communications.
We need look no further than the recent Arab Spring movement, fuelled by IT and social media, for evidence of what London Business School professor Lynda Gratton calls a ‘global consciousness’, with a powerful resource of networks and information at everyone’s fingertips. This is not only potentially changing the world, but is directly changing our association with the concept of work and definition of the workplace. Existing as we do in both the virtual and real world, the knowledge economy is driving the need for
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Cisco Emerging Markets Offi ce – London HQ Designers Penson Photographer David Barbour
// Cisco’s interior scheme uses fabrics and craft items from around the world to refl ect the culture of the emerging markets
// JULY/AUGUST 2011 13
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