ABSTRACT
The physical work environment appears as important as ever to how organisations perform. While the edging towards community and ecology from economy and polity is one way to sum up the tide of change in office design, there are ways to use the past to inform the future. The emergence of the networked office, however, depends critically on one factor – the growth of the knowledge economy, requiring the rapid acceleration of networks to capture, build and share knowledge. Doctors, lawyers, academics, accountants and scientists were among the first identified ‘knowledge workers’. Knowledge-intensive companies worldwide have begun to experiment heavily with office redesign to raise the productivity of their smartest workers, but the results so far have been mixed. While the big themes of future office design – such as networked workers’ clubs, knowledge worker interactions, city locations and branded contemporary design – form the outline picture of change, the more detailed strokes are taking time to come into focus.
