What would you say if I told you that from tomorrow onwards, your desk area will be reduced by half? In a recession, everyone is always trying to cut costs. One of the most obvious costs for any businesses is the money it pays to rent space. Especially where larger businesses are concerned, reducing the amount of physical space you need to allocate to each employee is seen as a very profitable area for consideration.

We spend most of our lives in the office, so understandably, any encroachment on our personal space at work is seen as a mortal offence, and most of us react quite nervously to the idea that someone is trying to optimise our use of office space. After all, the traditional way of doing this has been to decrease personal space, first from individual offices to cubicles, then from cubicles to smaller cubicles, open plan offices, and then finally open plan offices with tiny desks.

Open plan offices do have their advantages. Quite apart from being more economical with space, they’re more dynamic to work in, and encourage more communication within teams. This has many benefits for professions like architecture, where teamwork is of paramount importance. They’re quite configurable, too. If the patterns of work change (such as a job moving from design to the construction phase), we can rearrange the desks to match them. Unfortunately, the only way to make open plan offices more space-efficient, in their current form, is to further reduce the space per desk. This leads to disturbing visions of the future of office spaces. Who knows what next step they have in mind. I’m sure someone, somewhere, is dreaming of stacking employees vertically.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At my workplace, we’ve experimented with some much better ways to organise our working spaces. More on that further down, but first…

Hot Desk Communism

One radically different approach is, of course, hot-desking. It’s not popular in all industries (most architects that I know hate it), but it takes a new perspective on personal space in the office, by eradicating the idea of personal space altogether.

Whereas traditional office arrangements might be seen as a kind of dictatorial feudalism, where your personal space depends on your rank and the mandate of heaven (or the practice owner), hot desking is like communism for office space. Suddenly, no specific space belongs to anyone in particular. It all belongs to the commune. We sit wherever we happen to find some space, do our work there, and leave the desk intact, clean and impersonal when we leave to go back home in the evening.

Despite how unfriendly it seems at first, this does have some advantages. First, by decoupling the working space form the individual worker, we can take advantage of the fact that on any given day, ten to twenty percent of any large workforce will probably be away from their desks due to meetings or holidays. That’s the obvious, quantitative benefit. The less immediate gain is that it changes the way we relate to our work. With no formal desk, we really can work from anywhere, next to whoever we choose, whether in the office, at home, or in a coffee shop, and this can also loosen our mental rigidity and make us more accommodating to other changes.

A game of musical chairs

It also has its disadvantages. Much like the other kind of communism (the political one), it seems to go against many people’s instincts – nesting instincts, in this case. We humans are creatures of habit and we like to create a familiar, comforting space around us to support us in our daily endeavours. Because of this, most people are instinctively unsympathetic to the idea of not having their own office space. When I stick a post-it note to my desk one day, I like it to still be there the next morning.

Another reason people love to hate hot-desking is the first-come-first-served nature of it. Of course, if you’re the first one in, you’ll have the desk you want. But if you’re the last one in, you may not get a desk at all! Finally, hot desking is not always acceptable to architects, since we also have requirements to work in teams (and sitting next to each other helps!), as well as the space needed for masses of printouts, sketches, folders, models, samples and other physical artefacts that necessarily accumulate around us during the construction of a building.

A table with no legs

Is there a way to marry the advantages of hot-desking (the flexibility and efficiency) with those of fixed desks (the personally tailored, useful space that welcomes us every morning when we walk into the office)? I think so. At the architectural practice where I work in addition to Woobius, we’re experimenting with a more dynamic way to re-arrange the open plan office.

Here’s a diagram of its configuration principle. Our set up sits up to 10 people in a space that normally occupies 6 desks. I call it The Bench:

The Bench’s legs are arranged in the centre of the table, so that over time people can freely move around the table, close to or farther away from each other. Extra screens can be added, moved or removed as needed. The key principles that we’ve applied are the following:

1. Personal space – Each person has their own space that they come back to each day, where they can place whatever items make that part of the Bench their own.
2. Flexible space – Rather than the rigid limits of traditional desks, the Bench system lets people arrange themselves dynamically, occupying as much or as little space as they need.
3. Evolving space – The Bench also lets those personal spaces evolve continuously through time. As our project and our needs for space grow, we can slowly expand our area of the desk to take the space that we need. This is leaving desk allocations to the internal market forces of need rather than the rigid feudalism of corporate desk allocations.

Getting legless

Since we started this experiment 8 months ago, the use of the space on our Bench has changed many times, to adapt both to changing jobs and to the presence and absence of people. So far, it has kept up with our demands of it and proved to be a more enjoyable personal working space than traditional fixed desks, while at the same time keeping our team together and communicating, and it is so far the densest way we’ve found to fit ten people (in a space normally occupied by just six desks).

There’s not enough space in a single article to go into much more detail about this, but we’ll be sure to write about it some more in a later article. In the meantime, what do you think? Is this something you would want to try in your own office?