Co-working

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Ilana DeBare, covers this growing trend in shared workspaces citing community as one of the most appealing factors in joining one of the Bay Area’s clubs. Read our interview with Neil Goldberg from Work Club here. Full SFGate story here.

Google + Clive Wilkinson….new office paradigm?

Words like transparancy and shared-use pepper this look at Wilkinson’s redesign of the Googleplex in Mountain View. The building features brainstorming areas and a variety of unlikely spaces – like a staircase -in which Googlers are able to work.

 

Do the cultural needs at Google represent a new paradigm for knowledge workers where cubicles and designated offices exist among a variety of workspaces that users move through according to their needs and whim? Perhaps the notion of the personal office is a vestige of an old, industrial-age paradigm where a worker was deemed more productive when isolated from others to maintain focus and minimize distraction.

Neil Goldberg Interview

I spoke yesterday with Neil Goldberg from Praxis Design and founder of Workclub. There is an emerging trend of shared workspaces for the nomadic, small, hacker and startup demographic. Neil believes this evolved once the allure of home office and telecommuting wore off. People either realized that they wanted to separate their work and private lives (as we saw at Adobe) or to distance themselves from the distractions and/or comforts of the home. With the advent of available wi-fi networks and respective technologies, this drove them by the thousands into Starbucks all over the country.

The buzzing, public space of the cafe works for some depending on generational and personal preferences, but Goldberg sees that many people are starting to articulate the need for a facilitated workspace that has a little more to offer than caffeine and bandwidth.

Evidenced by a huge number of coworking sites listed on this wiki: http://coworking.pbwiki.com/ this is a global trend for the knowledge nomad. Rates are generally by the month and, of course, there are some right here in SF.

Many are called hubs and imply a meeting place to interact with other members, not just a place to plug in or hold a meeting. Goldberg feels that the ‘club’ factor creates a trusted community that is not necessarily bound by common business goals.

Furthermore, he foresees Starbucks, FedEx and airport lounges having to adapt to serve these changing needs of what seems to be a burgeoning market.

Collaboration v. Distraction

An article in the NY Times looks at multi-tasking capabilities and their impact on productivity in the office. Deep into the piece the author concedes some of this “lost” productivity may be necessary to allow for collaborative interactions to take place.

Download PDF of the article here