Modern Workspace: the vision
29 July 2020 | Written by Gary Cooper
Search for “Modern Workplace” and you’ll get a lot of results about ‘digital’, ‘collaboration’, ‘smart’, ‘connected’, ‘engaging’ and ‘what is the modern workplace?’ Now time to really start talking about the Modern Workspace
Created by the Office Labs group it shows one vision of how the seamless use of natural language, touch and gesture input, displays and cameras everywhere can create windows on information and bring people together from across the globe. This vision of ubiquitous computing still drives what many technology companies are trying to achieve today.
Microsoft have used the term around for a number of years ever since this inceptional video. I remember watching this with other wide-eyed Microsoft customers at Microsoft Campus back in 2009 and pondering on how long it would take before the innovations on display would become reality. More than 10 years later, we still don’t quite have fully transparent workstations or paper thin folding displays, but many of the concepts that rely upon unseen Artificial Intelligence such as on the fly translation are maturing. The Internet of Things is yielding never seen before integration of our environment with data and its presentation. Some things in the video, however, don’t change though and we still have offices and homes with timeless furniture designs from Charles and Ray Eames.
Since the video was first shown we’ve seen the Surface range of Microsoft devices appear; both the tablet and interactive display kind. These are baby steps towards the vision, but huge leaps in terms of what we had before them. What is evident though is that the concept of Workspace rather than Workplace has only accelerated. Technology has enabled us to work from anywhere, within reason, and as technology has become cheaper overall we tend to have better technology at home than we do in the traditional office. Bring Your Own Whatever applies more widely now than ever. The quest for seamless integration that unveils those amazing user experiences is still some way off though.
A colleague of mine once coined the phrase “work is what you do, it’s not where you go”, and this rings very true today as it did over 15 years ago when it was said. As workspace trends accelerate through the dynamics of technology, wellbeing and the environment, we see more need to improve on how these factors work together to work better. Wellbeing does not stop at the office door, for example. When working from home it’s just as important to ensure that you have the right working conditions as you’d expect in the office. The worry is that sitting hunched over a laptop writing documents and doing Zoom or Teams calls from home is going to have lasting consequences to your neck and back that were otherwise covered off by that monitor arm, sit/stand desk and ergonomic chair in the office. What was the exclusive domain of the well designed office needs to extend to the other locations that we do our laptop based work in. Not everything is a display and camera, yet.
Again, in this video produced 5 years after the first, Microsoft are taking the ubiquitous computing vision even further with more focus on materials science where almost anything can be a display. People carry only a small set of devices, some wareable, but view and interact with information on a wall or board.
It’s quite normal for companies like Microsoft to invent the future. They’re not alone in this pursuit, but their envisaging series has helped chart their course and also give us food for thought about how simple and frictionless work could be when all the right components align.
In this series of Insights related to the Modern Workspace we’ll look at this steps that we can start to take to achieve a working environment that is still, perhaps, 5-10 years away. What steps have all ready been taken? How otherwise separate disciplines converge to help create this vision. How organisations are evolving their own structures and capabilities and how the developers of the technology are taking baby steps to achieve a future that was envisaged 10 years ago.