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Emerald Article: The origins of new ways of working: Office concepts in

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Juriaan van Meel

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The origins of new ways of

working

The origins of
new ways
of working

Office concepts in the 1970s

Juriaan van Meel
Centre for Facilities Management Realdania Research,
Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

357
Received August 2010
Accepted December 2010

Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the origins of todays new office concepts,
focusing on the emergence of mobile and flexible working practices in the 1960s and 1970s. Thereby it
intends to add a sense of historical awareness to the ongoing debate about the work environment.
Design/methodology/approach The historical description is based on literature study, looking
at research reports, design handbooks and depictions of office life in popular culture such as movies
and advertisements.
Findings The paper demonstrates that todays new ways of working are by no means new. It
shows that the concepts of mobile offices, paperless offices, videoconferencing and flexible workplaces
all originate from the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. It also shows that these concepts were far
from mainstream, standing in stark contrast to the rigidity and conservatism of everyday office life at
the time.
Research limitations/implications This paper is the first result of a larger historical analysis of
the recent history of the work environment. Further historical research will add to the presented
insight in the evolution of office concepts.
Practical implications The papers insight into the historical development of office concepts can
help workplace strategists to make better, more careful forecasts of future workplace trends.
Originality/value Whereas most literature on the office concept tends to look at novel ideas and
future developments, this paper looks back at the recent past. It discusses early workplace
experiments that have been largely ignored, or remained unidentified, in much of the discourse on new
ways of working.
Keywords New ways of working, History, Desk sharing, Mobile office, Telecommuting, Space planning,
Office buildings, Innovation
Paper type Conceptual paper

Introduction
Consider the following description of an office project: It is an open floor plan
arrangement, but goes far beyond the traditional open space office, removing not only
office walls, but most permanent work stations as well. [. . .] Employees may locate
themselves anywhere they wish on any given day, or at different times during a day.
For those that are professionally involved in office design, this will sound familiar.
It could refer to any contemporary office project that applies a new way of working,
with employees no longer metaphorically chained to their desks, but moving from one
place to another, with laptops and smart phones, connected through thin air by
wireless networks.
The author wishes to thank Dr Heidi Lund Hansen of COWI and the reviewer for their valuable
comments on earlier versions of this article.

Facilities
Vol. 29 No. 9/10, 2011
pp. 357-367
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0263-2772
DOI 10.1108/02632771111146297

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But, interestingly enough, the description concerns an IBM project from 1970 in
which a group of product engineers gave up their private rooms to work in
what-they-called a non-territorial office.
A similar deja` vu can be obtained when looking at the first notable telework
research from 1973. In this project for an insurance company, telecommuting was
presented as a novel way to increase productivity, enhance the work-life balance of
employees and reduce the environmental impact of commuting issues that are still
very much alive today.
Looking back at the these early experiments, this paper will argue that many of the
concepts that we are presently referring to as new ways of working are by no means
new. Concepts such as mobile work, desk sharing, videoconferencing, the paperless
office and open plan offices originate all from the 1970s or even earlier. But, the paper
will also show that these concepts were far from mainstream at the time. In the 1970s,
there was a strong sense of change among futurists, academics and designers, but in
practice changes were slow. Typewriters and carbon paper only gradually gave way to
digital technologies. Furthermore, everyday organisational life was dominated by rigid
organisational structures and strong hierarchies.
This paper will describe both the visionary ideas and the everyday reality of office
life in the 1970s. By presenting this bifocal flash back, the paper aims to add a sense
of historical awareness to the ongoing debate about the work environment.
Furthermore, it aims to create a better understanding of how the emergence and
diffusion of new ideas is both driven and hampered by the socio-technological context
in which they are conceived. An additional objective is to trigger contemporary
workplace researchers to look back at this fruitful period. As the paper will show, the
research topics of the 1970s were in many ways similar, sometimes even identical, to
those of today.
Non-territorial at IBM
For a present day office worker, it will be hard to believe that people could be
productive in the 1970s. At the time, people worked with electronic typewriters and
dial phones with cords. Managers were called executives and behaved as such. People
were smoking indoors. Tea and coffee were provided by tea ladies. Cafe lattes did not
exist. Neither did internet or wireless networks. The founders of Google were yet to be
born.
Yet those were the circumstances in the modern idea of the non-territorial office
was conceived. It was in 1970 that a group of IBM product engineers moved, somewhat
reluctantly, into a new office space, which was described as something radically new
(Allen and Gerstberger, 1971). Not only was the office space without walls, it was
lacking permanent work stations as well.
The projects aim was to improve and increase the sharing of problems and
experience within the group. The basic premise was that people will not remain at
the same work station, but will position themselves wherever they can work most
effectively at a given time (Allen and Gerstberger, 1971). By moving around,
employees might more frequently see and meet each other, which consequently might
result in better communication.
In their new office employees could choose from a variety of desks, work benches, a
quiet area and even a total quiet area. Also, managers participated in the project,
giving up their private rooms. The only permanent work station was occupied by a

central communicator who handled all the incoming and outgoing mail, assisted
visitors, and operated a switchboard to direct calls to the phone nearest to the recipient
of a call.
This issue of personal belongings and papers was dealt by advising employees to
refrain from keeping personal artefacts in the new office. All photographs and books
had to be taken home. Necessary personal books would be replaced by the company
and would remain departmental property.
To test whether the new concept worked, the project was evaluated in great detail
by two researchers, Thomas Allen and Peter Gerstberger (Allen and Gerstberger,
1971). For a full year they followed the offices inhabitants, using weekly
questionnaires to assess communication patterns. Furthermore, they set up a control
group for data comparison.
Interestingly, the outcomes of this research were very much in line with those of
contemporary workplace studies. Allen and Gertsberger observed that before moving
into the new office, employees had, at best, mixed feelings about the project. The
researchers feared that the loss of control over personal space would become the major
problem. They noted that the opportunity to decorate a personal space has become
one of the few remaining avenues for expression of individuality in large
organizations.
To their surprise, however, the employees feelings towards the non-territorial
concept shifted in a favourable direction after move-in. In interviews, employees
volunteered opinions such as Dont ever fence me in again and I was skeptical
before, but Id hate to go back to closed office now. Furthermore, the research data
showed that the internal communication had significantly improved, as was hoped for.
Clearly, the non-territorial concept was a success. Yet, Allen and Gerstberger
cautioned that the concept was most likely to be most successful with groups that
spend much of their time out of the office (the IBM engineers spent a lot of time in their
labs). Furthermore, they warned that any widespread use of the concept should be
carefully planned because it could provoke a good deal of fear or even panic among
those who have not experienced it an observation that is still valid today.
Out of office in LA
A few years after the IBM experiment, in 1973, the phenomenon of telecommuting
started to take shape a term that was coined by the American researcher Jack Nilles.
According to his own account, Nilles became motivated with the concept when he was
stuck in a traffic jam (Nilles, 1998). He observed that commuting around LA was
arduous, costly, and time-consuming and he started thinking about ways some people
might work from home or satellite offices. Backed by the National Science Foundation,
he started a feasibility study for an LA-based insurance company (Nilles et al., 1976).
The firm was located in an overcrowded and worn office building in the central
business district of Los Angeles. One of the firms problems was the ageing of the
neighbourhood population, which forced it to attract and find its labour force further
from the office. These conditions made the firms management willing to explore Nilles
telecommunications-transportation option, which in this case meant creating
satellites offices in suburban areas close to peoples homes.
The study consisted of a thorough investigation of the companys existing
transportation patterns, work processes, population distribution and interaction
requirements. Various telecommuting solutions were formulated and compared. The

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extra costs of the required technologies were compared with the present costs of
commuting and real estate even including the costs of the need to provide lunch to
employees when they would keep on working at the office.
Perhaps not surprising given Nilles enthusiasm about the concept, the study
concluded that telecommuting would be feasible and beneficial to the company. It
would reduce costs and limit environmental pollution while increasing productivity at
the same time. All in all it painted a very rosy picture. Yet, Nilles and his co-researchers
were not blind to the downsides or difficulties of the telecommuting concept. They
noted, for example, that people may be hesitant in embracing the telecommuting
concept because of the strong social function of work. They observed that people in
many cases prefer to get out of the house, because the organization provides a
significant social function for the individual; for many people the organization is their
sole people-meeting place and provides their major friendship network. Furthermore,
they noted that in particular middle managers were likely to resist the idea of
telecommuting: The supervisor will be threatened because apparently his or her
empire is being diminished. Both observations would keep coming back in the
multitude of telework studies that were produced in the decades that followed.
Unfortunately for Nilles, the insurance firm decided to drop the idea. In retrospect
Nilles notes: At the start of the project we had a long list of things that could go
wrong, from a collapse in productivity to telecommuter angst. None of them happened!
[. . .] all the hoped-for positive outcomes occurred. All but one, that is. The president of
the insurance company decided not to continue with the telecommuting program after
the end of the research phase because of its radical nature (Nilles, n.d.). According to
Nilles, it took another 30 years before the same insurance company was again offering
telecommuting to its employees.

High-tech visions
Jack Nilles ideas did not come out of blue. Many academics, futurists and artists had
been thinking and fantasizing along similar lines. As early as 1969, the Austrian
architect Hans Hollein created an art-installation which he called the Mobile office or,
less catchy, Transportable studio in a suitcase. The installation consisted of a
inflatable plastic bubble in which one could sit with a telephone and a drawing board.
The installation was shown in a Austrian television show, where Hollein sat on a
meadow at an airport, flanked by aeroplanes and cameramen, demonstrating his vision
of the workplace in the age of telecommunications. Hollein said the work place of a
young architect like him consists of his flat [. . .], on the way to the building sites, the
airplane, and his third workplace is his atelier (quoted in Rumpfhuber, 2008).
In the same period, influential management writers and academics such as Drucker
(1969), Toffler (1970) and Bell (1974) had started to proclaim the rise a post industrial
society. In this new society, factory production would give way to knowledge work
and information technologies would play a critical and dominant role. According to
Toffler, this change would be radical and profound:
What is occurring now, is in all likelihood, bigger, deeper and more important than the
industrial revolution [. . .] the present movement represents nothing less than the second great
divide in human history, comparable in magnitude only with that first break in historic
continuity, the shift from barbarism to civilization (Toffler, 1970).

Toffler was rather bold in his statements, but his ideas about change were recognized
by many, especially by those who were working on new office concepts and
technologies.
In 1975, Business Week featured an article called Office of the future, which
argued that the office was the last corporate hold out to the automation tide that had
already swept through the factory, but this would soon radically change. The article
quoted George E. Pake, who headed Xeroxs highly innovative Palo Alto Research
Centre, saying There is no doubt that there will be a revolution in the office over the
next twenty years. What we are doing will change the office like the jet plane
revolutionized travel and the way that TV has altered family life (Business Week,
1975). Interestingly, Pake also made a remarkably accurate prediction for the work
environment for office workers in 1995: There will be a TV-display terminal with
keyboard sitting on his desk [. . .] I will be able to call up documents from my files on
the screen [. . .] by pressing a button I can get my mail or any messages. In the same
article the term paperless office was used, predicting that by 1990 most
record-handling would be electronic. The latter was an idea that was tried out a
couple of years later by a small group at the American National Science Foundation
(NSF). A manager, four professionals, and a secretary tried to handle to all their work
on-line. The only paper they were allowed to handle were printouts for those outside
the group, paper received from the outside, and legally required paper files. All of their
own work and data storage had to be digital. The NSF carefully measured the
productivity impacts of their paperless way of working and compared to results to
earlier situation. Very promisingly, the research data showed productivity increases
for typing (plus 73 per cent), filing and retrieval (plus 45 per cent) and general support
activities (plus 29 per cent) (Meyer, 1983).
Another technological concept that took shape during that time was
teleconferencing. In 1964, AT&T had presented its first picture phone at the world
fair in New York. This project proved to be a failure due to high costs, technological
inadequacies and a misperception of market need but in the 1970s it was relatively
common for large corporations to have video-equipped meeting rooms to hold
electronic meetings (Johansen et al., 1981). In the UK, the British Post Office created
Confravision: videoconferencing studios in a number of major cities, which could be
rented for long distance meetings. The brochure of the project said:
Well before the year 2000 dawns the city office worker wont have to get up every morning to
take the polluting commuter trail. He could be doing his job just as effectively from his living
room at home [. . .] Break through the travel barrier with Confravision, the intercity
conference service at your door [. . .] (quoted in Albertson, 1977)

The Confravision project was evaluated in great detail, comparing the accuracy with
which users (volunteers from the British Postal Service) were able to transmit
information when involved in a video teleconference versus a face-to-face meeting.
Perhaps not really surprising, the comparison showed that face-to-face was judged
better for meetings involving a heavy proportion of interpersonal relations, for
example, getting to know someone. However, opinion was evenly split between
Confravision and face-to-face for meetings characterized by an absence of any need for
personal relations and concerned mostly with presenting, discussing, and
manipulating facts or information (Noll, 1976).

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In this context of technological advances, it was not surprising that some dared to
state that at a certain point the office might cease to exist except as a switchboard and
electronic databank tucked away in any convenient location (Harkness, 1973). It was a
vision that was powerful, seemingly logical and attractive. There would be no need for
polluting commutes, work would become more efficient, and there would be more
freedom and quality of life for individual office workers. As an Economist editor wrote
in 1978: We will be able to live in Tahiti if we want to and still be able to telecommute
daily to our New York or Frankfurt or Tokyo office (Macrae, 1978).
Factory versus landscape
In everyday reality, office life was less exotic. New office concepts were much
discussed in the 1970s, but they were by no means mainstream. In fact, a new
generation of employees, the so-called Baby Boomers, was entering the office floor only
to find out that the corporate world was highly conventional, untouched by the new
technologies that were emerging or the social changes that had been taking place
during the turbulent 1960s.
In his book on life and culture of the 1970s, Thomas Hine notes: many of the baby
boomers parents who had worked in factories were determined that their children
would get the education to qualify them for white collar jobs. But a funny thing
happened in the office during the seventies: It became more like a factory (Hine, 2007).
Especially in the USA, the office environment showed large similarities with the
factory floor with large open spaces where identical work stations were positioned row
by row, in battle position (Staal, 1988). In some offices, the desks were actually
connected by a conveyor belt that carried papers from one desk to the other.
Greenbaum (2004) says that the controlled factory atmosphere in 1970s offices was
further emphasised by institutionalised office behaviour, imposing impersonal rules
for everything from proper office dress to forms of greetings. Men, for example, would
put their jackets on to go down the hall, while women would slip off their flat shoes and
put on a pair of heels when going to a meeting.
Jean Tepperman depicted traditional office life in 1976 as follows:
If you look around a typical office at three oclock some Tuesday afternoon, you have a sense
of placid order the fluorescent lights hum, typewriters clack, work is being ground out
under the watchful eyes of supervisors, coffee cups are filled. People are thinking about work,
or how many hours are left, or personal problems (Tepperman, 1976).

It is also typical for the 1970s that these type of workplaces were under heavy attack
by management thinkers, feminists, academics and enlightened executives. One of
the most influential management thinkers of that time was the American management
professor McGregor whose book The Human Side of Enterprise (McGregor, 1960), had
become one of the most popular business texts of the era. In the book, McGregor
addressed the central dichotomy of management: whether workers are self-motivating
individuals; or whether they are fundamentally idle and require constant policing.
These two positions he characterised as Theory Y and Theory X, respectively. The
Theory X model was considered as the traditional Tayloristic view, while Theory Y
was considered as more sophisticated with an emphasis on workers ingenuity,
participation and development.
The books message matched with the general changes that were taking place in
Western societies. As is well known, the 1960s had seen the rise of the counterculture in

society, which rejected the existing norms concerning authority, bureaucracy and
formality. With hierarchy discredited and conformity under attack, the old Tayloristic
Theory X principles seemed to be heading towards theoretical extinction (Frank,
1998).
In response to such new ideas about work, there were also architects who started to
rethinking the work environment. In 1970s handbooks there was no mention at all of
virtual, mobile or paperless office concepts, but there was a very strong debate about
the so-called office landscape. This concept had been developed in the early 1960s by
the German Quickborner Team and had become a well-known and much discussed
phenomenon during the 1970s (van Mee, 2000). As opposed to the factory-styled office,
the main goal of the office landscape was not supervision and order, but the creation of
a collaboration and egalitarianism at work. Managers and their employees were
accommodated in the same open space, according to the organisations communication
patterns, which created an organic configurations of work stations. In hindsight, Staal
(1988) described the office landscape as a somewhat disorderly variation of the open
plan.
The office concept was very much in line with McGregors Theory Y type of
employees, which were supposed to be self-motivated, equal and interactive. It is
important to note, however, that the office landscape was not a mainstream solution
and that there was a continuous debate between proponents and critics of the concept
(Saphier, 1974). Very few adopted the concept in its pure from, and especially in the
USA the factory model continued to dominate (Greenbaum, 2004). Saphiers (1974)
handbook on office design shows an interesting example of how 1970s notions of
hierarchy left their mark on the concept. The book shows two workplace layouts for a
manager: one in a private office and one in an office landscape. Seemingly different,
both are entirely similar in the sense that the managers workplace is shielded from the
rest and has his secretary acts as gate keeper.
Typewriters and carbon paper
The hesitant and incremental character of the adoption of new office concepts also
characterised the take-up of new technologies. In the 1970s, many of todays
technologies such as personal computers and the internet were already known in
concept or prototype, leading to much speculation about their impact on work
processes, but they were all still in an embryonic stage.
In most organisations, the term computer referred to large mainframes: bulky
computers that helped organisations to process all sorts of routine operations, such as
the processing of tax forms, flight tickets and insurance registrations. These machines
were accommodated behind closed doors in special climate-controlled computer rooms.
At the desks of rank-and-file employees, computers were far and away. In the
non-territorial office at IBM discussed earlier, there was only one computer that could
be used by the whole department.
According to Haigh (2006) a typical office of 1970s would actually not have shocked
a time traveller from half a century earlier. Documents were still typed, carbon copies
were still made for reference, messages were still transmitted on paper through internal
or external mail systems, telephones were still used for instant communication, and
documents were still in hanging folders placed in vertical filing cabinets. Changes had
occurred, but these were not overly disruptive. Copying techniques were supplemented
by Xerox copiers, electronic typewriters became common, calculating machines were

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now electronic and correcting fluid made it somewhat easier to remedy typing
mistakes (Haigh, 2006).
The 1970s state of technology was clearly illustrated by the illustrations and photos
in office design handbooks and office furniture advertisements of that time, showing
desks with dial phones and electronic typewriters rather than computers. Also the
popular 1970s movie All the Presidents Men (1976) showed a computerless office
environment. In this movie about the Watergate affair of 1974, journalists Bernstein
and Woodward do not use computers or word-processors, but jammer away on
typewriters in a large news room. The noise created by pounding on the typewriters
keys was a key element of the movies soundtrack.
A typical aspect of 1970s office technologies was the fact that they were used by the
lower echelons rather than by managers or professionals. Bernstein and Woodward
were working with typewriters because they were journalists, but in normal
organisations, office technologies were tools for secretaries, typists, file clerks, sales
clerks, bookkeepers and key punch operators.
In her book Windows on the Workplace, Greenbaum (2004) describes how the desks
of female clerical workers in the 1970s tended to have a protruding L-extension where
an electric typewriter or word processor sat, along with a telephone and maybe
Dictaphone equipment. In contrast, the desks of the higher echelons, such as managers,
analysts and other professionals, would only feature a telephone or multiple phones
for those that were truly important.
Greenbaums observation is perfectly illustrated by two figures in Geoffrey
Salmons (1979) hand book on office design, The Working Office: one of a secretarial
work station and the other of an executives room. The secretarial workstation is the
only one with a typewriter, while the manager has a Dictaphone and a phone. A telling
detail in the drawings is the fact that the managers room (whom is referred to as
boss in the figures original caption) is carpeted while the secretarys office is not.
The importance of gender in the use of technology was also clear in the
telecommuting study of Jack Nilles mentioned earlier. Nilles and his co-researchers
found that the operation of computer-associated equipment was considered by many
managers and professionals to be beneath their status, something that secretaries do
(Nilles et al., 1976). This notion is also reflected in one of the future scenarios that was
included in their book on telecommuting. The scenario is about a female worker who
combines her roles as typist and mother while working from home:
Johnny entered the kitchen. I dont feel so great, he said.
His mother leaned over him and felt his warm forehead. Hmmmm. Better not go to school
today.
She tucked him into his bed and went back to the kitchen. After putting some coffee water
on, she went to the study and dialed a number on the telephone. She waited for the signal and
placed the handset on a recording device. [. . .]
Putting on the headset, she began typing the first letter. [. . .] After typing the last letter on
the tape, she took the cartridge out of the terminal. Placing it in the recorder, she dialed
Secrepools distribution center and transferred her finished work.
As her son waited for orange juice and affection, she left the room.

Conclusion
The story about the female typist working from home while taking care of her child
shows that futuristic ideas tend to reflect the conventions of the time in which they are

conceived. Today, we would probably not use such a gendered example to illustrate the
benefits of working from home. In that sense many of the future visions from the 1970s
may seem rather dated. Yet, we can still safely conclude that todays ideas about
mobile, paperless and flexible ways of working were conceptually well established in
the 1970s long before these concepts were discovered and marketed by the furniture
and consultancy industry in the 1990s. This conclusion may not be surprising to the
veterans in the field, but it does present a critical note on the still on-going office debate
in which there is a tendency to label office concepts as novel, alternative or
innovative for marketing reasons, while they are actually iterations and repackaged
versions of earlier ideas.
This paper has also shown that the new ideas from 1970s were by no means
common or widely adopted at that time. While visionaries such as Nilles, Drucker and
Toffler were discussing the rise of the knowledge worker and new ways of working,
the majority of office employees still worked in factory-like work environments with
fixed positions for people, hierarchies and processes.
This gap between vision and reality has two probable explanations. The first
explanation lies in the fact that the technologies at the time were not yet able to provide
the speed, power and ease of use that people need for mobile and flexible work styles.
The second explanation lies in the corporate mindset of the 1970s. It seems that
managers were simply not yet ready for these ideas, not willing to provide employees
with the high levels of autonomy that come with mobile and flexible ways of working.
Some industries and companies were more progressive than others, but in general
office organizations were command-and-control structures, characterised by hierarchy
and rigidity, and little freedom for individual employees.
Reflection
Interesting question is whether todays organizations are more ready for these
concepts. Without doubt, present day work life is different from that of the 1970s. In
general, it has become much more digital, loose, informal, flexible and mobile.
Yet the conventional office is still very much among us. Just like in the 1970s, the
large majority office workers still travels back and forth to their work on a daily basis,
spending hours on congested roads or in packed commuter trains to get to large office
blocks which are filled with identical desks, assigned work stations, bland conference
rooms and paper-filled cabinets. Even the much critiqued factory office seems to
have survived four decades of change, taking the shape of call centres where people in
large open-plan offices are clocked and monitored in a fully Tayloristic sense.
The persistence of conventional office types can probably be explained by various
factors, such as the conservatism of employers and the inertia of the office industry as
a whole. Also fear of change by employees is often noted as a barrier for the wide-scale
adoption of new office concepts. But there is also a more functional and positive
explanation. As the first notable book on telework from 1976 pointed out, office
buildings have an important social function. It is a place where work becomes
meaningful through interaction, where friendships and networks are formed, where
newcomers are integrated and where acculturation processes take place. The American
management guru Thomas Davenport (2005) put it this way: Knowledge workers
work at the office [. . .] They like flexibility, and they like to work at home occasionally.
However, they know that to be constantly out of the office is to be out of the loop
unable to share gossip, exchange tacit knowledge, or build social capital. From this

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perspective, it is not very likely that the office as we know it will dissolve into
cyberspace any day soon.
Even so, we should not be too quick to denounce new ways of working as recycled
1970s ideas that ignore social reality of office life. A quick glance at the public spaces of
any major city shows a highly mobile work force, equipped with smart phones, iPads,
laptops or other gizmos that enable them to be always on-line, and, consequently,
always on-duty. They are making Hans Holleins concept of a Transportable studio
in a suitcase a reality. The same goes for a concept like teleconferencing. For a long
time, these systems have been rather clumsy, delivering bad quality in terms of sound
and image, but todays systems are very convincing in creating a real life experience
and large international companies seem eager to use them. And even the idea of the
paperless office for long the a classic example of a techno-Utopian prophecy gone
awry is making a comeback (The Economist, 2008) thanks to new devices such as the
Kindle and the iPad.
These are the type of technologies and applications that Toffler and his
contemporaries were dreaming about. After four decades of maturing and
experimentation, they have finally arrived in full force, penetrating all aspects of
life. Obviously, they will also leave the mark on the work environment, especially now
a new tech-savvy generation of employees is entering the workforce. Much of what has
been written about this generation (variously referred to as Gen Y, Millennials, Net
Generation or Facebook Generation) is highly stereotypical and exaggerated, but it is
quite likely that they will think differently and be more comfortable with mobile,
flexible and paperless ways of working than their pre-internet predecessors.
Looking at such technical and social developments, it is tempting to state that the
conventional office is finally on its way out. However, given the observations that have
been made in this paper, it is probably wiser to refrain from making such statements.
As it has shown, there tends to be a large gap between the smartness of futuristic
predictions and the messiness of everyday work life.
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About the author
Juriaan van Meel is a workplace researcher and consultant, currently working on an
international comparative study of workplace design at the Centre for Facilities Management in
Copenhagen (Denmark). His previous publications include The European Office (2000) and
Planning Office Space: Practical Guide for Managers and Designers (2010). Juriaan van Meel can
be contacted at: juvme@man.dtu.dk

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The origins of
new ways
of working
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