We rejoice in public, outdoor space – dragging chairs around Bryant Park, riding over inter-borough bridges, sitting on stoops, taking the stairs, paying six bucks for a latte to work from a café – because it allows us bust out of the boxes, untethered, mostly unsupervised, and in these places, reclaim our down time and personal space.

With this in mind, and feeling the need to get up from my desk one day last week, I went along to WorkTech 10, a one-day conference on the future of the workplace, at a swank Manhattan venue. [For more Omnibus coverage of the future of the workplace, click here. -Ed.] (Note the discipline of getting up from my desk and the fanciness of the corporate destination, please, because it’s between these two extremes that the day’s discussion ran.)

Images, L-R: Bill Moggridge; Florence Hudson; M Moser Associates.

The purpose of the day was unabashedly commercial: to bring corporate facilities managers and workplace consultants together. So what drew me? The day’s presenters exposed the audience to the broader questions transforming commercial concerns: How does work shape a city? How do cities become workscapes beyond the traditional office block? If we’re not to be victimized by the future, do we merely need to just manage it better?

The answers are demographic, economic, social and, of course, technological. A new generation of digital natives will redefine what work is and where it will get done; cautious optimism after a crushing downturn is also leading us to see Manhattan as what author David Owen calls ‘our nearest close example’ of sustainability through urban density.

Keynote speakers included Bill Moggridge, the newly appointed Director of the Cooper Hewitt Museum; David Owen, New Yorker journalist and author of Green Metropolis; Andrew Laing of workplace consultancy DEGW; and Florence Hudson of IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative.

A series of case studies followed: a comprehensive green retrofit of the Empire State Building, demonstrating not only a 40% saving in that landmark’s energy costs but also implying large commercial real estate’s significant contribution to increasingly sustainable cities; M Moser Associates’ comprehensive corporate facility for Nokia in China, showcasing a corporate ‘city’ within a city on the outskirts of Beijing; and Kursty Groves’ lighthearted look inside the most creative spaces in business, I Wish I Worked There, about enterprises with space to be inspired, think, share, explore – and a sense of humor.

Peter Miscovich of Jones Lang LaSalle, and conference organizer Philip Ross of the UK’s Cordless Group were most excited by and articulate about new communications technologies and their transformative potential for how we work: Skype and video conferences instead of a congested commute; data stored and secured in the cloud rather than on-site in a frigid, cable-filled basement server room; autonomic systems will light, heat and cool buildings adaptively, by occupancy.

From detailed investigations of productivity, Herman Miller’s Jennifer Magnolfi and Microsoft’s Ian Sands suggested that work environments, like software, must be designed programmatically, to be customizable, secure, safe and seamless. In other words, inhabitable. For that, user engagement is critical, to reveal expectations, habits and tools, all clues to responding to the creative demands of that space.

Of course, how technology supports collaboration is a familiar refrain, and we’ve speculated on its impact on the workplace for years, since mainframes were made obsolete by PCs, in turn overtaken by laptops, only to be outdone by smartphones and tablets. What’s new, as we get to work anywhere, is that we will work in ‘post-sedentary’ workspace, said Andrew Laing.

We are already working, as Philip Ross put it, ‘on the pause’ and in third spaces (neither at home, nor a designated office, but in flexible environments, like libraries or for-fee spaces like Soho House) – the places between A and B, snatching time between scheduled meetings.

We won’t go to the office to access hardware and work files, but for the empty space, social contact and pause it provides: For a desk to put down our bags and to charge up devices so we can go greet clients, or, get this, to think, write or sketch quietly or concentrate on our own, if only to emerge, confer and present later.

In the day’s discussion, consideration of where we go to work alone took second place to collaborative work. In the end, what’s enjoyable about work is both social and individual experience, in both environmental and managerial contexts, as Peter Drucker spells out in “Managing Oneself.” If you’re having a lousy day at the office, does it matter how bright the walls are? If you’re working in a windowless cubicle farm with no AC this summer, answer yes, and call your facilities manager.


Rachel Abrams is Creative Director of collaborative design practice, Turnstone Consulting LLC, in New York. She is on the Faculty of the SVA Interaction Design MFA Program, and has also taught Service Design for Public Space to a class at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. As a Fellow of the Design Trust for Public Space, she co-edited Taxi 07: Roads Forward, and has recently contributed to New York City’s Taxi of Tomorrow program.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The Building as Microcosm
I run a communication design firm. We create projects that take design cues from insights on how people interact with information. Most recently we created an online platform called STACKD. It is a directory, a marketplace, a communications channel and a lens through which to view the city.

The idea for this project came from a number of observations after our company moved into a 20-story building on W 28th Street. First of all, we were new to the building; we did not know anyone here. Secondly, this building has some size to it. It may not be huge by New York standards, but there are over 100 tenants: four to six tenants to every floor, accessed via two main elevators with a freight elevator serving as back-up for when the mains fail (and they often do). Our previous location was a six-story building in which we knew everyone, for better or for worse. Eminem’s Record label Shady Records thumped away directly one floor above and sewing machines whirred from the sweatshop beneath us. Even though I knew who was in the building, the moment the elevator doors opened to reveal such different realities was always jarring. This sense of curiosity about what might be happening inside a large vertical building became even more pronounced once we had moved to our current, significantly taller location. I was reminded of writings by Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas that grapple with disjunction and multiplicity, so I spent some time rereading Architecture and Disjunction and Delirious New York. Tschumi distinguishes three basic types of relationships between the actual and intended uses of architectural space:

“Specifically, three basic types of relations can be distinguished: (a) the reciprocal relation, for example to skate on the skating rink; (b) the indifferent relation, for example to skate in the schoolyard; and (c) the conflictual relation, for example to skate in the chapel, to skate on the tightrope” (Tschumi 1996: p. 186)

The unexpected mix of program in a Manhattan highrise isn’t exactly “skating in the chapel” but it nonetheless excites and feeds the imagination. Rem Koolhaas sets the stage for multiplicity when he retells the birth of the skyscraper in 1909:

“The building becomes a stack of individual privacies … the use of each platform can never be known in advance of its construction…” (Koolhaas 1994: p. 85)

As we started getting familiar with our new neighborhood on the last street of the Flower District, I was curious who else was in our building. Being able to listen to the conversations in a class C building such as 150 W 28th Street would reveal much that is unexpected: a healing center that provides “scream therapy”; a wholesale-only purveyor of minerals and crystals; one of the city’s most prominent florists. The rent is reasonable for New York and the neighborhood has an ad-hoc, undefined quality that has attracted a wide range of businesses from a variety of sectors. Brief glimpses of floor directories revealed other creative industries such as design, advertising, architecture and photography. Even though some of them are the competition, it always makes me feel welcome to know there are other companies nearby that do something similar. The history of the neighborhood and its role as the Garment District has also left a trace. The last of the fur trimmers that once defined this part of the city are here, dustmotes of mink in every corner.

Supply and Demand
I caught glimpses of people in the buildings across the alley and noticed when offices were suddenly empty after they had housed busy bunches of people for months. It made me nervous, but I talked to people in the elevator, asked what they did and never had more than a few seconds to find out. Strange how we share the ride staring at our feet. People make crude flyers and notes posting items for sale or marketing their services in the elevator but they rarely pause to talk – maybe because the elevator is always moving and the chime urges you to get out quickly.

Sharing resources between multiple floors… can play a role in making the city – and its use of space – more legible. A palpable sense of the great story of New York City unfolding all around us appealed to my imagination. As an entrepreneur accustomed to identifying demand, I began to see the building as a potential market for our services. Craigslist and Ebay proved that there was a huge dormant need to connecting buyers and sellers on an individual scale. If we didn’t know already, Facebook showed that people are social animals and thrive on sharing something of themselves with each other. Twitter is taking the world by storm just by giving people a megaphone and 140 characters of broadcast time. As designers versed in proposing solutions we began to imagine whether we could create something that could make use of our specific physical location – something that would open doors for us but could also connect supply and demand on a larger scale.

One of the reasons our business is located in New York City, and I imagine the same holds true for many others, is opportunity. In my mind, opportunity is intensified by density – a density of potential clients, of talented people, of inspiration and also the density of competition. Kenneth Jackson recently lectured on the five reasons why New York will bounce back from the current recession to thrive in the next century: Density, diversity, tolerance, aspiration and the willingness to change. All of his arguments can be found above and below my desk on the 14th floor. With this in mind, we decided to narrow our focus for STACKD to an extreme. We wanted to create a way to reach the other businesses in our own building. Wouldn’t they have similar needs to our own?

How it works
STACKD emphasizes physical proximity in each feature that it offers. Users are prompted to act upon the information STACKD provides for the simple reason that updates are extremely timely and that someone else is easy to reach because they are located close by. You can see these qualities emerging in systems that did not originally account for them. For example, Craigslist users have introduced an informal feature dubbed “curb-alert” in which people post when and where they are going to put something out for free pick-up. If it’s close to where you are, you score.

Let me give you a quick tour through the STACKD user interface.

The current version does only a few things. On a map, it shows which buildings belong to the network. Once a user wants to know more and has selected a building they are prompted to log into the system (or join if they are not a member yet). Membership is important to track information and to ensure that only users who are willing to share information can also access it. Once you are logged in and click on a building you can see – listed in a vertical stack – the businesses located there. Selecting a particular business reveals contact information and industry as well as what the business offers and needs on a regular basis. If that’s all you need to know, then click on the contact email address and send the business a note or give them a call. Above this directory listing is an area that we call the feed. This is where the building does its talking and where you can listen in. Every building is set up with a twitter account so that others can tweet to it and follow the collective conversation. Once you have used STACKD for a while, the twitter feature becomes an important alert to information that is time-sensitive or changing. I could tweet that I have a chair to sell, or that I am looking for a tip on where to go for lunch. If we were to consider our building to be part of a network that can circumvent the borders of individual offices then I could also let other businesses know when our conference room is free or that we have a spare desk on Thursdays and Fridays.

Clearly, resource sharing requires an open attitude and the desire to change established conventions. However, with coworking communities emerging throughout New York City, sharing resources between multiple floors may not be far behind. As we continue to work on STACKD and as it expands to other buildings, perhaps it can play a role in making the city and its use of space more legible. Architectural typologies could adapt to contemporary needs and business cycles. The first step is seeing what is happening. One of the biggest challenges with large amounts of information is making sense of it all. As visual creatures, we’re equipped with sophisticated interpretative capabilities that yield insights at a glance far more readily than confronted with purely quantitative information. With the right interface and mapping capabilities we could gain a more fine-grained understanding of what kinds of activities are performed in what parts of the city.

Networked Spaces and the Future of the City

Urban Omnibus recently published a number of articles that address the issue of excess capacity. In a conversation with Rosalie Genevro, Frank Duffy commented on how corporations’ use of space leaves it underutilized much of the time. He posits that spaces must have the idea of change built into them in order to adapt. The theme of underutilization also drives an article with ZipCar founder Robin Chase, that introduced a ride-sharing platform to make use of the excess capacity of individual seats in a car heading to a shared destination. Laura Forlano reflected on the proliferation of coworking spaces in the city. Meanwhile, New York City has discussed ways to enable cab sharing and hopefully will soon find a way to implement bike-sharing.

All of these efforts share something simple: in order to make use of the excess capacity in a network, I have to see that it exists and I have to be able to access it. STACKD offers an interface that could fit this need. Individual offices could be transformed into a network that functions as a marketplace connecting supply and demand of services, products and resources. Planners could see a fine-grain use pattern result from zoning initiatives and open-space guidelines. Businesses such as restaurants could position their next location based on geolocated market analytics. Start-ups could join ad-hoc incubators by knowing where strategic partnerships might flourish. In the city of the future, I might be able to use space and do business more efficiently. Perhaps excess space could be allocated to form building-wide or neighborhood-wide amenities. Underutilized buildings would display why they are ignored and could be retrofitted with more flexible typological configurations. Owners could make decisions about their property portfolio by incorporating space utilization statistics. We just might learn which parts of the city will continue to thrive and why.

Sidney Blank runs the strategic communication design firm Supermetric. His background in architecture greatly influences the methodology and areas of interest of his work as a designer. STACKD is the first self-initiated project created by Supermetric that aims to tie people, architecture and business together. Sidney currently teaches in the Design & Management department at Parsons, The New School.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Frank Duffy is a British architect, noted for his research and design work on the changing nature of the modern office. He is the author of Work and the City, one of five books in Black Dog’s Edge Futures series that explores the impact of global climate change on various aspects of social life, including education, transportation, community and Duffy’s own realm of expertise: the nature – and spaces – of work. Duffy’s command of this topic is rare, honed in the thirty-six years since he co-founded DEGW, an architectural firm whose emphasis on social-scientifically informed space-planning practices, organizational consultancy and post-occupancy evaluation makes it singular in the field.

In the book, Duffy argues against contemporary cities’ irrationally low use of their existing office space. In so doing, he echoes in unexpected ways Robin Chase’s call to maximize our use of excess capacity in transportation. And he foreshadows Laura Forlano’s future-facing analysis of new intentional communities springing up in self-organized work environments.

On a recent visit to New York, Duffy took Rosalie Genevro, executive director of the Architectural League, on a walk around Lower Manhattan, to reflect on our office stock and what it means in the context of our changing city.

Read an excerpt of their conversation below, followed by an audio-slideshow of their walk. -C.S.

Rosalie Genevro: Do you see any glimmer of hope in our recent and current financial meltdown?

Frank Duffy: I think the crisis might stimulate a beneficial thought process, in two principal ways. The first is related to the question of sustainability, which I think is going to work its way through the whole system. And the second of course is information technology, which is changing the nature of organizations. The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore, because organizations are always bigger or smaller and constantly changing. At least half of them operate in a virtual world, in a placeless world. The crisis is going to demonstrate that there’s too much space. And a lot of people are going to be frightened by that. Hopefully that fright will lead to some beneficial realizations.

RG: It may be a very painful transition – it seems to me that we already have a lot of empty space that won’t be absorbed because it won’t be needed.

You also make the argument in Work and the City that even in terms of existing space that is occupied, we use it at an irrationally low level – it is just not inhabited much of the time.  Even for people whose interest is in making money from the built environment, that argument doesn’t seem to have penetrated.

Buildings aren’t made out of glass, concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.FD: Actually, I think it will penetrate eventually.  I thought, twenty years ago when I spend a lot of time encouraging development, that facilities managers would bring some intelligence into the system; but instead of thinking about the supply chain, they were much more interested in their own deliverables rather than longer-term use value. The vertical silos that exist within these very large corporations pose another very important problem. We need to weave together, keeping the end-user’s point of view in mind, the organizational silos within which, say, human resources departments look after human resources departments and information technology staff interact only with information technology staff. In that context, it is very difficult to create organizations that are agile.

That being said, there are many things about the American office that are extremely intelligent that Europeans didn’t necessarily pick up on until much later. Americans were less interested in the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk and supported the skills of people like interior designers, space planners, decorators and others whose scope – within the building – was to meet the short-term needs of five- or ten-year tenants. That system was invented here. It’s a wonderful system. And it’s a perfect example of not getting everything “right in a night” but leaving scope for change and adaptation. That’s the principle that I’m trying to articulate in this conversation. Not all design decisions have the same longevity. Buildings aren’t made out of glass and concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.

One of the things I like about New York is the juxtaposition of the old and new in the way that the blocks have been developed. That is a component of the recipe for success of long-term urban fabric: it is capable of being modified internally and externally as social and technological change develops. Older stock has been moved out of exclusive office use into other purposes, older buildings turned into apartments for example.

RG: If we are to build fewer new buildings, how do we decide what’s worth building?

FD: Well, I think you can test that. You can think through the process of working on a floor plate or building section, thinking about what its use-potential is.  If I were a building owner these days, that’s something I’d be interested in: the future potential of existing structures, whether they’ll have to be extensively modified to cope with change or not.

I am very much involved with the Olympics at the moment in London.  The so-called “legacy” and “transitional” phases of the Olympic sites are very important.  We’re trying to do a think-over of a way of designing things that can mutate and develop into other things over time.  One of the curses of architecture is its instantaneity.  The definite statements of each individual building do not necessarily cumulatively add up to something that has got the idea of change built into it.  But urbanism should include that idea, and older cities have had that capacity to accommodate change. The mono-functionality that you see from here very clearly is vulnerable.

Another theme is that the design and use of interstitial spaces – made in the context of the knowledge economy – is becoming more important than the buildings themselves or what happens inside them. So, designing for the full spectrum of uses over a large area, having a mix of uses and then having the principle of change built into that so it can develop and mutate and move from one kind of use to another. These are the fundamental secrets of urbanism.

The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore.RG: How can you design for that? That has always seemed to be the accreted nature of cities. The most interesting places tend not to be the work of one hand, of one designer.

FD: Or one financier. It’s always been difficult, but I think we’ve made it worse by the way in which buildings are financed, procured and developed. Cumulatively, over the course of the twentieth century, this has made each building more and more specific and separate in itself rather than something that adds to a more complex urban fabric.

Certainly, from an architectural and user point of view, I’d think about what different building forms can accommodate, and how ambiguity, choice and potential can be built into design over a long period. Thinking about the buildings themselves in a much more sophisticated way. But also thinking about the nature of the interstitial spaces – who owns them, who manages them, who loves them, who takes advantage of them. That’s something that we have not given enough thought to.

RG: Thinking about the interstitial spaces as providing for serendipity or accommodating the unexpected is very hard to do as a designer.

FD: Well I don’t see why it needs to be so. It’s all about scenarios, thinking through what could happen, and what is fixed.

RG: What’s the appropriate role of the public and public decision-making bodies in all of this?

FD: The city and citizens are two levels.  The city should always fight for the long-term.  The individuals always try to find ways of penetrating the system to make sure that it meets their changing needs.  There are feedback channels that should be built into much more of the urban fabric.

The fascinating paradox of the power of technology and its ability to allow people to choose when and where to work, is that it actually makes more poignant and more important the city-like things that are good at bringing people together. The more we disperse, the more we need to congregate. I think the true nature of a city is discourse, especially in a knowledge economy. It’s about places – serendipitous encounters. That’s another design principle to be brought into urbanism. Places that are valuable because they are unprogrammed and open-ended and allow accidents to happen.

For a long time there was a correlation between the patterns of work and the shape of the building. What’s happening now is that patterns of work are changing faster than the shape of the buildings. And we have models of buildings that are inherently vulnerable because they are not good at accommodating groups, they are not permeable, they make assumptions about levels of occupancy that are untenable and easily refuted. They can’t be changed into anything else.

They’re brittle – they snap, they can only do one trick.

I became aware of this in the 60s and 70s in the regeneration of the decayed industrial cities of the UK – Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham. In order to bring great stretches of the Liverpool docks back into beneficial use, we had to realize that the older buildings – because they were robust and adaptable – could be used for a wide range of purposes apart from what was originally designed. They could be used as art galleries, workshops or hotels, for example.

What’s the lesson there? The lesson is about making a building tough enough to accommodate change, to have enough volume, to have columns in the right places, attractive ceiling heights, a relationship to the sky and the outside that is tolerable. These were considered to be obsolete and useless, but they were brought back to life. So I think the difference is that these newer office buildings are so flimsy – so value-engineered – that they have only a very limited range of utility.

The reinvention of place, the pleasure of place, the use of place for talk, commerce, etc. That’s terrific. To be freed from the “8-hour day.”  These are, in human terms, recent inventions, no older than 200 years. People thought of and used time in a very different way before that.  And we’ll invent something new ourselves. This discussion about the nature of buildings is only a subset of a much broader discourse about the nature of life in what I hope will be a much better world. I don’t think the twentieth century’s my favorite century actually. I think there were one or two things wrong with it.

Click ‘Play’ button below to start slideshow

Interview conducted by Rosalie Genevro. Edited and condensed.
Photos by Cassim Shepard.

Work and the Open Source City. Illustration: Shumi Bose

One chilly Wednesday afternoon in late May, I joined a small group of technologists, researchers, architects and urban planners on a field trip through Lower Manhattan and three distinct neighborhoods in Brooklyn to get a glimpse of the future of work. The trip was organized by Todd Sundsted, an entrepreneur and co-author (with Drew Jones and Tony Bacigalupo) of the book I’m Outta Here! The group met around mid-day at New Work City, one of Manhattan’s first “coworking” communities. The space, located on the 5^th Fl. of the building adjacent to the famous music venue Sounds of Brazil (SOBs) on the corner of Houston and Varick, officially opened to members in November 2008.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge work among entrepreneurs, programmers, writers and even, as we learned during our visits, sustainable furniture designers. The majority of discussions of the social implications of the Internet on the evolution of work and cities revolve around concepts such as the virtual office, online collaboration, and telecommuting. But, coworking communities (and related phenomenon that have grown out of the culture of the open source movement such as MeetUps and BarCamps) illustrate the ways in which these emergent forms of organizing are deeply embedded in physical places and, at the same time, enabled by new technologies such as laptops and wireless networks.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

As the material artifacts of offices – messages, documents, photos and plans – are digitized and stored on servers, physical spaces have the potential to become increasingly open, flexible and sharable. Data security concerns aside, one can imagine a future scenario when most of the tools that we need to work effectively will be accessed and stored in “the cloud”. This allows the dynamic reorganization and co-location of people, firms and activities that have been separated since the early days of industrialization, the advent of the hierarchical firm and the rise of cities themselves. For example, an office building might house a conference room that doubles as an entertainment room for the co-located apartments. Such arrangements will require new ways of thinking about private and semi-private spaces, trust and security, and ownership and property.

Rather than lonely, pajama-clad programmers holed up in Grandma’s basement, a closer look at the nature of virtual work reveals that after several years of experimentation — ranging from working from home in relative isolation to slouching uncomfortably at Starbucks — mobile workers (including freelancers, the self-employed, remote workers and entrepreneurs) have begun to band together to form office communities of like-minded coworkers whom they don’t actually work with, but rather, they work alongside in order to “cross-pollinate.”

This cross-pollination comes in many forms, from the informal, water-cooler conversations about the last episode of Battlestar Galactica to intensive lunch meetings about bookkeeping for freelancers, and from quickly troubleshooting a Google Calendar feature to collaborating on events and projects. For example, while New Work City hosts regular workshops for technology entrepreneurs, it is also a hub for Open Government meetings.

In late January, on a trip to Kansas City to meet with the Kauffman Foundation, I stumbled into a Panera Bread directly across from my eco-friendly hotel in order to get some lunch within hours after landing. After devouring a bowl of chicken soup in one corner of the nearly-empty restaurant, I noticed two women and a man poised in front of their laptops with a small pink rectangle sign on the table that announced “Creative Club” in large letters and “Jelly” in smaller letters underneath.

Panera Bread, Kansas City. Photo: Laura Forlano

Jelly, founded by Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford in New York in February 2006, is a semiweekly casual coworking event that typically meets at someone’s apartment. It was only their second meeting, but nonetheless, to the surprise of the Kansas City group (a graphic designer, a public relations professional and a sustainable design consultant), I instantly recognized their effort and documented it as part of the larger coworking phenomenon. I presented it the following day at Kauffman.

In his work on social innovation and creative communities, Italian designer Ezio Manzini, presenting as part of the Stephan Weiss Visiting Lectureship at Parsons in early May, makes the point that small, locally-based initiatives such as co-housing have an unprecedented ability to scale globally. As such, the local is no longer an isolated, provincial village that seeks to return to the past but rather a connected cosmopolitanism according to Manzini.

In search of these small but scalable social innovations, our group squeezed onto the B train to Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn where we visited Ditmas Workspace, a coworking community for writers and researchers located on a “Am I really in Brooklyn, New York?” street lined with large Victorian houses garnished with expansive flowerbeds and trees. Interestingly, Victorian houses are not subject to the zoning requirements that separate residential and office uses of the built environment. This has allowed the 12 members of Ditmas Workspace, half of which are full-time employees working remotely and half of which are freelancers, to create an affordable workspace of like-minded colleagues in the neighborhood where they also live and raise their young children.

Ditmas Workspace. Photo: Liena Zagare

Liena Zagare, an urban planner who founded the Ditmas space in September 2008, emphasized the benefits of the cross-fertilization of ideas and the synergies that take place in the community as well as the need to separate “quiet work” like writing with “loud work” such as doing phone interviews, which they do through the designation of specific rooms for these dissimilar activities.

Our next stop was to Treehouse Coworking, a community for designers in downtown Brooklyn. There, Matt Tyson, a sustainable furniture designer at EcoSystems, which is currently located on the 4^th floor, guided us through all 7 floors of the building. We climbed top to bottom one cold, dark and dusty stair after another since we had exceeded the elevator’s carrying capacity. The building is completely and meticulously filled with art, objects, antique furniture, old mattresses and junk collected over 27 years by the owner. In describing his motivations for opening the Treehouse space to the coworking community in January 2009, Tyson said, “I want to be surrounded by really smart people…I have a strong affinity for community.” Treehouse will soon be offering classes at their woodshop in order to train people interested in learning new hands-on skills, a boon in the ailing knowledge economy.

Treehouse NYC. Photo: Matt Tyson

All this talk of cross-pollination and social innovation throughout the day recalled a very different experience that I’d had several weeks earlier while away at a Pervasive Computing conference in Japan. While I had survived the rigorous one-hour swine flu quarantine procedure resembling a scene from The X-Files complete with men in green cover-ups, goggles and masks that scanned the passengers with a thermo-sensing camera, I had failed to reserve a hotel with Internet access.

While at the Asakusa Shrine in Tokyo, I noticed that I was dangerously close to the limit on the 20 MB data plan on my iPhone 3G and sought out the nearest Internet “café” (if one could call it that). I would, I had decided, call AT&T on Skype in order to upgrade to a bigger data plan. However, upon entering, I was told by the attendant at the counter that I was not allowed to make calls while in the café. In addition, only one person was allowed to accompany each laptop computer into the space.

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge. Rather than spaces for mobile work, it is well-known that many of Japan’s Internet cafes are, in effect, living spaces for the country’s unemployed youth who have taken to holing up in private Internet cubicles about the size of an English telephone booth but without the distinctive red paint. The 24-hour cafes come equipped with instant ramen and vending machines, rows of pink comic books and showers; they even sell toiletry sets containing combs and shower caps for 160 yen in the women’s restroom so that their guests can freshen up in the morning.

But, rather than sites for community, collaboration and innovation (though I can’t claim that these qualities are completely absent after only a one hour visit), the spaces remain absolutely silent and devoid of social interaction, perhaps so as to not disturb the patrons that are sleeping? In the end, I found – to my utter surprise – that AT&T had finally created a page that allowed me to add and remove international data plan features without suffering through a redundant twenty minute conversation with a customer service representative. Problem solved, and without uttering a single word.

Back to Brooklyn. We ended the day, which was actually quite exhausting after all of the stairs at the Treehouse space, at The Change You Want To See Gallery in Williamsburg. Again, the conversation shifted to the importance of opening their space to coworking as a way of enabling collaboration on media interventions by artists and activists.

The Change You Want To See gallery. Video: Not an Alternative.

As we redesign our cities with these emergent open source models for the reorganization of knowledge / work in mind, we might ask ourselves about the changing nature of our relationship to our work that is reshaping our identities, loyalties and communities. In the future, New Yorkers won’t ask “What do you do?” over pints of German beer and currywurst in the East Village but rather “Where do you work?” Rather than merely a place to do work, the choice of a like-minded coworking community with the right amount of diversity and exposure to new skills and ideas could be as important as choosing a neighborhood to live in.

Laura Forlano is Kauffman Fellow in Law at Yale Law School. Her research interests include mobile and wireless technology, the role of space/place in communication, collaboration and innovation, entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and science and technology studies.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

We heard how technology enables workers to create environments for themselves in the relative absence of employers. As corporations pull back on staffing, we’ll see more liberated workers trying to get things done in a more volatile environment. It’s a case of “who moved my cheese” but also “wow, look what I can do with these constraints removed.”  Those reviewing the state of work need to be diligent about highlighting new work products and work-patterns as they emerge.

Duffy’s presentation framed most of the discussion, drawing on material from his recent book “Work and the City.” He stepped through a brief history of how Frederic Taylor’s Scientific Management principles separated work into discrete explicit tasks, broke down the secret knowledge of the workers, and kept control of the factory floor. He contrasted it with the “social democratic” concerns of Post-War Europe, which created large campuses of office pods that nurtured and insulated the individual at the expense of collaboration and efficiency. Finally, Duffy asked what can be achieved in a 21st Century environment of “ubiquitous access to networked resources.” Do the old requirements of worker co-location and synchrony apply?

In response, Duffy argued that the current complex of real estate interests, architectural firms, and construction companies now creates its Class-A real estate according to accumulated conventions but without much thought of workers’ real present needs. Duffy challenged all parties to rethink the status quo: for successful workspaces to take shape, workers needs will have to regain priority in the building process.

The other speakers both corroborated and challenged Duffy’s analysis. Nicole Russo of the Downtown Alliance spoke of the real-world success transforming an office building in the Financial District into residential housing. Even these difficult spaces can be reclaimed and repurposed. If zoning is prescribing, rezoning is ‘re-scribing’ what these buildings should do. Laura Forlano pointed to an increasingly mobile workforce’s practical successes transforming public places into usable workspaces.

Audience members weighed in from the conservative side (it’s very hard to translate new ideas for a clients “looking for a certain amount of square footage on a certain piece of dirt”) to the progressive (new workspaces and work-patterns, such as coworking, are out there looking for more academic and media attention).

Looking forward, these concepts and problems get some real-world testing this summer during the Breakout Festival starting September 12 through the work of the Architectural League, DEGW, the Downtown Alliance, and NYCwireless (including yours truly).

The views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Rob Kelley manages technology projects that connect mobile, social and local space. His past experience includes JetBlue Airways and WeightWatchers.com. He serves on the Board of NYCwireless, helping to make New York City a better place.