The office is shrinking as tech creates workplace everywhere ⇢

courtenaybird:

Offices traditionally use 200 to 300 square feet per worker — an average of everything from clerks’ cubicles to executive suites. By encouraging staff to work from home, getting rid of offices, even resorting to “hoteling” — workers check in when they’re in the office and get assigned a desk for the day — some companies are slashing average square footage per worker to less than 100, about the size of a one-car garage.

Working from home is on the rise nationally. In 2005, 3.6% of the 133.1 million workers ages 16 and older telecommuted, according to Census data. Five years later, 4.3% of 137 million workers did their jobs from home.

(via USAToday)

Futuramb: What is interesting to note here is that digital communication and processing technology is actually changing the concept of both work and the office - but not in the direct, simplified way we expected when we talked about telecommuting in 80:s and 90:s. What are the five main lessons to learn to be able to understand technological change?

1. Structural change always take longer than we think - at least 25-30 years
2. Our view of how the change will occur is usually too simplified and relies on a number of concepts that is consistent with a certain mental model - the new, big bug but late effects (think S-curve) then appears to come without warning from behind a corner   
3. It is not the technological change per se we actually talk about when talking about change - it is the social, organizational, economical or political change we are after - and they will not take place until a technology is embedded and successfully spread to an extent that it change the world for a significant number of people - and that is a complex and socially driven diffusion process which is difficult to predict
4. New technology tends to initially strengthen the existing model because it is used as rationalizing tools making old and soon to be outdated methods more efficient - in some cases even makes them more stuck into the structures than before 
5. A new technology cannot revolutionize the world on its own - it needs to find an entrence into the world and for that it needs:

• to be packaged into a product, service or concept that has a technological working environment
• a market/user base that is interested in using the application which is its current incarnation
• a way to manage the value streams between the participant in the value ecosystem

When talking about IT changing the workplace it is also the case that it was an oversimplification to treat IT as one technology. What we understand now IT is a deeply complex issue that partly relies on the spread of sufficiently intelligent devices as well as a well development infrastructure, all this tied together in a working business model that makes it available for the masses.

Source: courtenaybird

13 June 36 emergentfutures

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    It is not the technological change per se we actually talk about when talking about change - it is the social,...

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    I love this!

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    Futuramb: What is interesting to note here is that digital communication and processing technology is actually changing...

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    Yep

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