So: why do we build all of these offices? Anyone who’s lived in one of these environments already knows the real reasons, which have nothing to do with getting work done.

For example: “having an office” signifies an individual’s political affiliation with a department, or their status. Professors that have a joint appointment in two different departments will, quite often, have a separate office in each of the departments. Professors that become department chairs retain their original office, but then also have the official “department chair” office.

I just found your blog today on the way to other things, and got stopped at this post while scrolling through. In other words, please pardon a fast response before getting to know you better.

The issue of designing space for collaboration, I’ve found, begins with the primary tool of interface between architect and client, the design “program.” Clients of architects have been taught, many times by their architects, to express their facility needs in a roster of spaces and area requirements (23 offices at 150 square feet…), also aligned usually with status (4 SVP offices, 8 VP offices, 24 staff workstations).

The obvious problem is that in addition to using a language that replicates the organization already in existence and constrained by the wrong kind of space, none of this explores or expresses how it is that people actually work, let alone other key determinants of better design like the culture and values of the organization, the types of people who work there, the technologies and other tools they use, etc.

A great primer toward a different way of uncovering and expressing an organization’s facility needs is the classic “Problem Seeking” by William Pena. He lays out a very nice technique for getting at the information that helps define a better design “problem statement.” I’ve used the methodology most of my career and have found it to yield not only designs that my clients appreciate, but also a richness to my own career as clients have, because of this method, come to trust me (a Washington University educated architect) as a business consultant as well as a designer.

A valuable tool we’ve developed at my company (Gensler) is what we call the Workplace Performance Index. The WPI provides us a means of changing the formal lexicon of the workplace.

Our research showed us that four key work modes typify how work is done in most organizations these days—focus, collaboration, socialization and learning.

Our tool is an online survey that we use early in a design engagement to learn what people need to support their work, profile their workmodes, and in combination with other tools (space utilization studies, workplace observations, focus group workshops, etc.), develop guidelines for design from this information.

In almost every case we find significant transformation takes place as people move from demands for entitlement-based space assignments to desire for spaces and places that support their workstyles and work modes.

Incidentally, you may find in the university context something that we’ve consistently found in the corporate context—the built real estate of the conventional office goes unoccupied and underutilized more than 50% of the day. It seems to be that technology has made us more mobile, and our work is naturally more collaborative, so we already are seeking (as you state in your blog) and using the places that allow us to meet with and work with others more easily and, in most cases, this is not the conventional office.

We need to design not only to support people more effectively, but also, certainly, more sustainably. Designing around workmodes seems to make people and organizations more productive, and significantly reduces the demand on real estate and its resource and energy consumption.