Title Das Smarte Büro
Publisher Messe Frankfurt Exhibition GmbH
Paperworld, Ludwig-Erhard-Anlage 1, 60327 Frankfurt am Main
Concept MATTER Schmidt Fach Architekten und Stadtplaner PartGmbB
Design Julia Neller
Editorial/Text Ludwig Engel, Stefan Carsten, Joris Fach, André Schmidt
Translation Alan Connor, alcon-translate
Print Messe Frankfurt Medien und Service GmbH
Copyright Messe Frankfurt Exhibition GmbH 2019
Smart Solutions
When it comes to tomorrow's world of work, digital transformation is the key term. Completely new forms of office work have already emerged through networking, interaction, and automation, such as remote work or co-working spaces. How will this evolve in future and what does this mean for the world of paper, office supplies and stationery products? These and other questions will be answered by experts at the "Future Office". The 2020 innovation area is dedicated to the topic of "Smart Solutions".
It covers more than just digital tools. Beyond that, employees strongly appreciate the "well-being factor". All this needs to be combined in a modern office to ensure an attractive workplace in the age of New Work.
The innovation area shows how analogue and digital elements can be combined and challenges solved in a smart way. A series of lectures, product presentations and best-practice examples will transport the future of the office world to the real stage in Frankfurt.
For architects, planners, facility managers and dealers of office products in particular, the innovation area offers practical input and the opportunity to exchange ideas with experts.
1. SPACE
Office vs. Home Office
As the technologisation and digitalisation of economic processes slowly took off in the 1980s, existing spatial concentrations were immediately called into question: Will we continue to live in the city under these new conditions in the future? Do we still need places of work? Thanks to information and communication technology, won't everything take place simultaneously everywhere in the future? Today we know that these visions have not necessarily been reversed, but have developed completely differently to how we imagined. Yes, we work at home. Yet we also work in the office. And when we come home in the evening, we simply continue to work. Places of work are becoming less and less separate from each other. The transition from one to the other is fluid. While the office is the base that provides an optimal working environment to best reflect the processes and communication of everyday life, the home office might be described as the supporting bureau that offers both relief and an extension. On top of this, there are the locations and rooms that represent the necessary connections between both offices. The car. The café. The park. Numerous telephone conferences already take place here today, although the conditions are anything but optimal.
So what's smart for the future is to view the connection of all these places as a representation of the lived workspaces that make and call for different demands on the office users.
My Desk vs. Hot-Desking
An ever-increasing number of companies are converting their physical office organisation to flexible workplaces. Of course, this not only involves motivating employees to network more flexibly with their co-workers, but also cutting office space and, with it, costs. Since more and more employees are absent from the office each day, the office no longer needs to be as large to accommodate everyone. Most employers therefore simply pursue a flexible office design in order to promote (and demand) a freer understanding of co-working, variety, and flexibility in (economically) stable times. A fixed workplace continues to have advantages: in uncertain times, a secure physical workplace in a trusted environment of familiar faces provides an island of certainty that goes hand in hand with the possibility of a kind of personalisation (so-called "desk biotopes" emerge). At the same time, the urge for flexibility increasingly reveals the social instabilities in the working environment. Desk-sharing in open-plan offices tends to lead to distraction, mistrust, and a decreasing willingness to cooperate among colleagues. Smart, by contrast, is a good mixture of in-house workplaces and open arrangements that can be used in different ways. And as long as the hierarchy is still reflected in the office organisation, the acceptance of additional flexibility will not be particularly high. It is only when bosses work flexibly that employees do the same. And vice versa.
Wayfinding vs. In-House Navigation
Approximately 70% of people today use a smartphone navigation app to get around town. Life without GoogleMaps, Apple Maps or Waze is still possible in everyday life, but for many people it is (almost) unthinkable. More and more often, navigation tips can even help in buildings like airports, football stadiums or shopping centres, where disorientation often quickly sets in. Will navigation by smartphone also enter the office world in future? So far, classic, static guidance systems still dominate here. Although it is possible to reserve rooms online, a conference room remains a conference room that can be booked or not. There are no plans to change the use of the room itself. However, since offices have now become a collection of temporary special rooms and zones, a transparent, daytime-dependent allocation of room uses is indispensable. The smart solution is an in-house navigation system if it works on-the-go. In this case, the users' behaviour is mapped: the kitchen is quickly transformed into the conference room, the library into the event room, and the reception area into the bar for an after-work drink. This can be better regulated with a smartphone than by constantly placing new stickers with arrows all over the office.
Office Space vs. Functional Zoning
The regular office is perfectly okay. It is nonetheless threatened with extinction. Chillout zone, gaming area, telephone booth, conference space, silent room and, of course, the meeting point. Every function has its own room. Every room has a designated function. The time spent at your own desk is logically getting shorter and shorter, and the time spent in the function rooms is growing ever longer. All in all, however, the time spent in each of these room units is decreasing. Everyday office life is consequently a sum of different tasks in different rooms. This was also the case in the past, but the functional rooms were not specifically (furnished) and, above all, were not designated as such so dogmatically. So is the specific functional room just one side of the coin, and the general-purpose office the other? As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle: much depends on people's expectations of future technical developments. For Elon Musk (TESLA and SpaceX), for example, the vision is clear: with his company Neuralink, he plans to link the human brain with artificial intelligence. Then all that is needed is a functioning interface enabling daily tasks to be performed efficiently. This would then be the embodiment of an all-encompassing special room. But to be completely honest, is that smart? Wouldn't it be truly smart if we could use an interface anywhere providing access to required information and data anytime and anywhere - no matter if it's at a round of table football or in a telephone booth?
2. WELLBEING
Sit vs. Stand, Recline, Walk
Taking 10,000 steps a day significantly improves people's health. That's rather a lot. Who's supposed to do the work with all this walking going on? Fortunately, the 10,000 steps are a myth dating from advertising which, in the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, was intended to motivate the inhabitants of the capital to get more exercise. Current studies, however, only lower the figure marginally: A healthy body needs between 6,000-8,000 steps a day. On average, office workers actually manage only 1,500 steps a day. After all, they spend half the day in meetings, at their desks, eating, commuting by car, or watching their smart TV at home. In Germany alone, over 60 million days a year are lost due to back problems. There is a simple remedy, however: sitting, standing, lying, walking. The healing power for the back lies in variety. And this is becoming progressively easier thanks to sensory monitoring and individual requirements. Smartwatches track our steps and provide us with a report on our movement profile at any time. Unfortunately, we are reluctant to be monitored. The smart person in this case is the one who does it anyway.
Central Heating vs. Microclimate
Climate change is becoming increasingly noticeable, in facility management as well. Buildings with a growing expanse of glass and less shading combined with an increase in the number of hot and sunny days, as well as a rise in average temperatures, are posing particular challenges for creating a work-friendly climate in offices. Now imagine that in the future the building would no longer have to be supplied with air-conditioning, because you would take responsibility for it yourself: Your own climate drone accompanies you constantly from room to room, from meeting to meeting. In this way, you would always enjoy the perfect climate everywhere, not in the room, but on your body. The advantage would be that every participant in a meeting would always have their personally preferred climate around them and not, as is customary, a structural air-conditioning system that may well react to a heated atmosphere in the meeting, but not to individual preferences. Gone would be the days when, after an intensive meeting, the air would hang in the room and there would be constant annoyance about the ventilation or heating. And because the climate robot would also work outdoors, even smokers would no longer freeze their fingers off. Compared to these utopias, the smart office chair already sounds far more tangible. In addition to the usual ergonomic refinements, the chair would boast fans and heating elements and communicate with the central air-conditioning system via WLAN or Bluetooth in order to be able to react quickly to changing climatic requirements. The smart result offers efficient and therefore cost-saving air conditioning, and loads of fun adjusting and regulating the fans to liven up an exhausting session.
Acoustic Insulation vs. Sound Cloud
If someone is wearing in-ear headphones (e.g. Apple's AirPods) in the office - which, incidentally, is increasingly the case in open-plan offices - there are a number of possible reasons for it. 1. a telephone conference, 2. listening to music or podcasts, 3. pretending to do 1. in order to be left in peace, 4. forgetfulness. The fake call (3.) in particular is occurring more and more frequently because the hustle and bustle in the office - constantly under observation, permanently pumped up - is exhausting and not conducive to intellectual activity. AirPods now do what office walls have been designed to do for decades: create a (private) atmosphere of seclusion. Today, in an open-plan office without walls, some people can no longer imagine a working day without cordless headphones: "We moved from offices to an open plan two years ago, and wireless headphones are why I haven't quit," says an employee of a media company in New York, for example.
The fact that acoustic harassment can be tackled in this way is one result. The other is that the willingness to collaborate, the readiness for face-to-face exchanges has rapidly fallen with the appearance of open-plan offices. And what is really interesting: the reasons for the rapid increase have always been linked to the requirements of modern working societies: interdisciplinarity, communication, teamwork. But it is precisely collaboration and communication that work(ed) better in times of single or double offices. In an open-plan office, there is also the added problem of visual strain. Although Google Glass can apply an additional layer of digital information to everyday office life, it does not provide any privacy. Maybe, in the digital age, analogue walls are sometimes pretty smart.
Lunch Box vs. Office Restaurant
"Lunch is for wimps," says Gordon Gekko, a fictional character in the 1987 Hollywood blockbuster Wall Street. The hard-nosed banker thus made a remarkably good forecast of a trend that is still valid today, especially for North America. For office workers in particular, lunch is more like a fodder ritual than a dining ceremony. No wonder, then, that studies show between 50-60% of US employees prefer to eat at their desks and, above all, to eat alone. As a rule, desk diners begin by consuming smaller, less nutritious foods, and then attempt to compensate for this during the course of the day with sweets or other snacks. As a consequence, job satisfaction drops dramatically in comparison to employees who eat with their colleagues, engage in small talk, and then return to their job (usually motivated). Most readers will also be familiar with the consequences for desks and computers: crumbs, splashes and food leftovers that have to be removed from the keyboard and documents with greasy fingers. Considering this, it is infinitely smarter for more and more offices to be equipped with high-quality kitchens. Sometimes the employees are even provided with culinary delights to suit every taste by chefs. In Silicon Valley, by contrast, the efficiency practices of start-uppers have now progressed to the point where vegetable shakes and vitamin preparations are ingested throughout the day to maintain maximum performance without "losing" any time for eating. Is that so smart?
3. COMMUNICATION
Analogue vs. Digital
An observation from one of today's most innovative office atmospheres, Google's Design Lab in Silicon Valley: light-flooded rooms with countless bar tables for conversations, discussions and presentations. Hanging or lying on the walls and tables are design variations, material samples and colour spectra. Workshop rooms and galleries are equipped with material libraries for comparison, modification and customisation. Bookcases everywhere offer both design classics and current inspirations. Here, the physical triumphs over the digital. And maybe it's no wonder given that the resulting products such as Google Assistant speakers are intended to adorn millions of homes and offices, where they have to constantly participate in the competition for equipment design. It is nonetheless interesting that almost everything in the design lab of today's most important digital company seems to take place in an analogue fashion. Laptops, monitors, and mobile phones are hardly to be seen, if at all. The interaction, discussions, contact with and through the designer make the difference. Smart here means materiality, accessibility, openness. Also smart here at Google are the so-called Human Refuelling Stations: room installations for workers to retreat to and meditate in order to recharge their batteries, clear their minds, and focus their thoughts, underpinned by personalised sound and lighting designs. Maybe a bit over the top, but seemingly very pleasurable for the users.
Archive vs. Data Cloud
In the past, there were archives with shelves that were miles long; today there are server rooms. And while at some point shelves become full, the storage capacities of the digital age are almost infinite: by 2025 the worldwide volume of data could increase tenfold again, to 163 Zettabyte. That's 163 followed by 21 zeroes! Even though we maybe shouldn't trust this forecast blindly (perhaps more in the direction of 22 zeroes?), it is becoming clear that the perspective on archiving will change fundamentally. If, according to Foucault, the archive is described as the "game of rules", this set of rules needs to be redefined in light of the advent of digital archives. The digital processing of data requires a new logic, or a new concept of the archive, namely one that preserves data as information. It could also be said that data is only relevant if the information available in it can be found at any time. But an archive is also a place of constant knowledge transformation: whether through decay, oblivion or destruction. Whereas archives used to be attributed the three basic tasks of collecting, archiving and presenting, today's technologies and developments offer the possibilities of networking, collaboration and distribution - and while archives were previously rather restricted and reserved for specialist audiences, new technologies could also open them up to the general public. The ideal archive of the future prepares content in such a way that users can access it at any time and for any purpose. And then it is smart. Unfortunately, this is still somewhat rare today.
Flipchart vs. Smartboard
The flipchart is an all-purpose weapon that hasn't even been replaced by the smartboard. Even though probably every user has at some time or another jammed their fingers while inserting a new roll of paper, the effect of a seminar room fully plastered with flipchart sheets is unparalleled. For this alone, the Smartboard offers no alternative. But for other things it does: no paper wastage, direct transfer to the computer, access for all participants, and a digital archive. Virtually every office (and almost every classroom in the meantime) already has a Smartboard. Even though not a few of them have been defaced by permanent markers, and one or the other is probably just standing around in a corner for this reason, they are an indispensable part of everyday office life. Analogue and digital complement each other perfectly today and in the future. This is also confirmed by current findings in cognitive research: we humans learn via all our senses. Those who artificially limit themselves when learning or working on projects tend to be at a disadvantage. Smart in this context then is anyone who not only has redundant systems and uses them, depending on the context and level of knowledge, but who also doesn't limit themselves to one medium. The best results are achieved when the entire portfolio of media and materials is used to the full.
Face to Face vs. Conference Call
With Pixar's headquarters, Steve Jobs developed the prototype of an office with a spatial design that was primarily oriented towards promoting opportunities for chance encounters. To this day, Pixar is regarded as one of the most creative companies, whose success can to a large extent be attributed to architecture. Steve Jobs' legacy - the Apple headquarters that opened about one and a half years ago - also embraced this approach as a guiding principle. The Infinite Loop, with a 12-hectare park inside the loop, can be understood as a lobby that encourages spontaneous encounters and shared walkways. The positive effect of this random communication is now also supported by scientific findings. Where do decisive breakthroughs, important ideas or innovations take place today? Not at the microscope or in front of a computer, but at the conference table, at the vending machine, and in the corridor. Direct communication and exchanges about projects therefore arise through specific spatial settings that facilitate random encounters. In addition to communication rooms, employees also need free time, which is made available for interaction. When more and more meetings are scheduled, this is unlikely to encourage impromptu encounters. So smart is when all employees are given the space and time to meet by chance in unpredictable places and at unpredictable times.
Title Das Smarte Büro
Publisher Messe Frankfurt Exhibition GmbH
Paperworld, Ludwig-Erhard-Anlage 1, 60327 Frankfurt am Main
Concept MATTER Schmidt Fach Architekten und Stadtplaner PartGmbB
Design Julia Neller
Editorial/Text Ludwig Engel, Stefan Carsten, Joris Fach, André Schmidt
Translation Alan Connor, alcon-translate
Print Messe Frankfurt Medien und Service GmbH
Copyright Messe Frankfurt Exhibition GmbH 2019
Smart Solutions
When it comes to tomorrow's world of work, digital transformation is the key term. Completely new forms of office work have already emerged through networking, interaction, and automation, such as remote work or co-working spaces. How will this evolve in future and what does this mean for the world of paper, office supplies and stationery products? These and other questions will be answered by experts at the "Future Office". The 2020 innovation area is dedicated to the topic of "Smart Solutions".
It covers more than just digital tools. Beyond that, employees strongly appreciate the "well-being factor". All this needs to be combined in a modern office to ensure an attractive workplace in the age of New Work.
The innovation area shows how analogue and digital elements can be combined and challenges solved in a smart way. A series of lectures, product presentations and best-practice examples will transport the future of the office world to the real stage in Frankfurt.
For architects, planners, facility managers and dealers of office products in particular, the innovation area offers practical input and the opportunity to exchange ideas with experts.
1. SPACE
Office vs. Home Office
As the technologisation and digitalisation of economic processes slowly took off in the 1980s, existing spatial concentrations were immediately called into question: Will we continue to live in the city under these new conditions in the future? Do we still need places of work? Thanks to information and communication technology, won't everything take place simultaneously everywhere in the future? Today we know that these visions have not necessarily been reversed, but have developed completely differently to how we imagined. Yes, we work at home. Yet we also work in the office. And when we come home in the evening, we simply continue to work. Places of work are becoming less and less separate from each other. The transition from one to the other is fluid. While the office is the base that provides an optimal working environment to best reflect the processes and communication of everyday life, the home office might be described as the supporting bureau that offers both relief and an extension. On top of this, there are the locations and rooms that represent the necessary connections between both offices. The car. The café. The park. Numerous telephone conferences already take place here today, although the conditions are anything but optimal.
So what's smart for the future is to view the connection of all these places as a representation of the lived workspaces that make and call for different demands on the office users.
My Desk vs. Hot-Desking
An ever-increasing number of companies are converting their physical office organisation to flexible workplaces. Of course, this not only involves motivating employees to network more flexibly with their co-workers, but also cutting office space and, with it, costs. Since more and more employees are absent from the office each day, the office no longer needs to be as large to accommodate everyone. Most employers therefore simply pursue a flexible office design in order to promote (and demand) a freer understanding of co-working, variety, and flexibility in (economically) stable times. A fixed workplace continues to have advantages: in uncertain times, a secure physical workplace in a trusted environment of familiar faces provides an island of certainty that goes hand in hand with the possibility of a kind of personalisation (so-called "desk biotopes" emerge). At the same time, the urge for flexibility increasingly reveals the social instabilities in the working environment. Desk-sharing in open-plan offices tends to lead to distraction, mistrust, and a decreasing willingness to cooperate among colleagues. Smart, by contrast, is a good mixture of in-house workplaces and open arrangements that can be used in different ways. And as long as the hierarchy is still reflected in the office organisation, the acceptance of additional flexibility will not be particularly high. It is only when bosses work flexibly that employees do the same. And vice versa.
Wayfinding vs. In-House Navigation
Approximately 70% of people today use a smartphone navigation app to get around town. Life without GoogleMaps, Apple Maps or Waze is still possible in everyday life, but for many people it is (almost) unthinkable. More and more often, navigation tips can even help in buildings like airports, football stadiums or shopping centres, where disorientation often quickly sets in. Will navigation by smartphone also enter the office world in future? So far, classic, static guidance systems still dominate here. Although it is possible to reserve rooms online, a conference room remains a conference room that can be booked or not. There are no plans to change the use of the room itself. However, since offices have now become a collection of temporary special rooms and zones, a transparent, daytime-dependent allocation of room uses is indispensable. The smart solution is an in-house navigation system if it works on-the-go. In this case, the users' behaviour is mapped: the kitchen is quickly transformed into the conference room, the library into the event room, and the reception area into the bar for an after-work drink. This can be better regulated with a smartphone than by constantly placing new stickers with arrows all over the office.
Office Space vs. Functional Zoning
The regular office is perfectly okay. It is nonetheless threatened with extinction. Chillout zone, gaming area, telephone booth, conference space, silent room and, of course, the meeting point. Every function has its own room. Every room has a designated function. The time spent at your own desk is logically getting shorter and shorter, and the time spent in the function rooms is growing ever longer. All in all, however, the time spent in each of these room units is decreasing. Everyday office life is consequently a sum of different tasks in different rooms. This was also the case in the past, but the functional rooms were not specifically (furnished) and, above all, were not designated as such so dogmatically. So is the specific functional room just one side of the coin, and the general-purpose office the other? As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle: much depends on people's expectations of future technical developments. For Elon Musk (TESLA and SpaceX), for example, the vision is clear: with his company Neuralink, he plans to link the human brain with artificial intelligence. Then all that is needed is a functioning interface enabling daily tasks to be performed efficiently. This would then be the embodiment of an all-encompassing special room. But to be completely honest, is that smart? Wouldn't it be truly smart if we could use an interface anywhere providing access to required information and data anytime and anywhere - no matter if it's at a round of table football or in a telephone booth?
2. WELLBEING
Sit vs. Stand, Recline, Walk
Taking 10,000 steps a day significantly improves people's health. That's rather a lot. Who's supposed to do the work with all this walking going on? Fortunately, the 10,000 steps are a myth dating from advertising which, in the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, was intended to motivate the inhabitants of the capital to get more exercise. Current studies, however, only lower the figure marginally: A healthy body needs between 6,000-8,000 steps a day. On average, office workers actually manage only 1,500 steps a day. After all, they spend half the day in meetings, at their desks, eating, commuting by car, or watching their smart TV at home. In Germany alone, over 60 million days a year are lost due to back problems. There is a simple remedy, however: sitting, standing, lying, walking. The healing power for the back lies in variety. And this is becoming progressively easier thanks to sensory monitoring and individual requirements. Smartwatches track our steps and provide us with a report on our movement profile at any time. Unfortunately, we are reluctant to be monitored. The smart person in this case is the one who does it anyway.
Central Heating vs. Microclimate
Climate change is becoming increasingly noticeable, in facility management as well. Buildings with a growing expanse of glass and less shading combined with an increase in the number of hot and sunny days, as well as a rise in average temperatures, are posing particular challenges for creating a work-friendly climate in offices. Now imagine that in the future the building would no longer have to be supplied with air-conditioning, because you would take responsibility for it yourself: Your own climate drone accompanies you constantly from room to room, from meeting to meeting. In this way, you would always enjoy the perfect climate everywhere, not in the room, but on your body. The advantage would be that every participant in a meeting would always have their personally preferred climate around them and not, as is customary, a structural air-conditioning system that may well react to a heated atmosphere in the meeting, but not to individual preferences. Gone would be the days when, after an intensive meeting, the air would hang in the room and there would be constant annoyance about the ventilation or heating. And because the climate robot would also work outdoors, even smokers would no longer freeze their fingers off. Compared to these utopias, the smart office chair already sounds far more tangible. In addition to the usual ergonomic refinements, the chair would boast fans and heating elements and communicate with the central air-conditioning system via WLAN or Bluetooth in order to be able to react quickly to changing climatic requirements. The smart result offers efficient and therefore cost-saving air conditioning, and loads of fun adjusting and regulating the fans to liven up an exhausting session.
Acoustic Insulation vs. Sound Cloud
If someone is wearing in-ear headphones (e.g. Apple's AirPods) in the office - which, incidentally, is increasingly the case in open-plan offices - there are a number of possible reasons for it. 1. a telephone conference, 2. listening to music or podcasts, 3. pretending to do 1. in order to be left in peace, 4. forgetfulness. The fake call (3.) in particular is occurring more and more frequently because the hustle and bustle in the office - constantly under observation, permanently pumped up - is exhausting and not conducive to intellectual activity. AirPods now do what office walls have been designed to do for decades: create a (private) atmosphere of seclusion. Today, in an open-plan office without walls, some people can no longer imagine a working day without cordless headphones: "We moved from offices to an open plan two years ago, and wireless headphones are why I haven't quit," says an employee of a media company in New York, for example.
The fact that acoustic harassment can be tackled in this way is one result. The other is that the willingness to collaborate, the readiness for face-to-face exchanges has rapidly fallen with the appearance of open-plan offices. And what is really interesting: the reasons for the rapid increase have always been linked to the requirements of modern working societies: interdisciplinarity, communication, teamwork. But it is precisely collaboration and communication that work(ed) better in times of single or double offices. In an open-plan office, there is also the added problem of visual strain. Although Google Glass can apply an additional layer of digital information to everyday office life, it does not provide any privacy. Maybe, in the digital age, analogue walls are sometimes pretty smart.
Lunch Box vs. Office Restaurant
"Lunch is for wimps," says Gordon Gekko, a fictional character in the 1987 Hollywood blockbuster Wall Street. The hard-nosed banker thus made a remarkably good forecast of a trend that is still valid today, especially for North America. For office workers in particular, lunch is more like a fodder ritual than a dining ceremony. No wonder, then, that studies show between 50-60% of US employees prefer to eat at their desks and, above all, to eat alone. As a rule, desk diners begin by consuming smaller, less nutritious foods, and then attempt to compensate for this during the course of the day with sweets or other snacks. As a consequence, job satisfaction drops dramatically in comparison to employees who eat with their colleagues, engage in small talk, and then return to their job (usually motivated). Most readers will also be familiar with the consequences for desks and computers: crumbs, splashes and food leftovers that have to be removed from the keyboard and documents with greasy fingers. Considering this, it is infinitely smarter for more and more offices to be equipped with high-quality kitchens. Sometimes the employees are even provided with culinary delights to suit every taste by chefs. In Silicon Valley, by contrast, the efficiency practices of start-uppers have now progressed to the point where vegetable shakes and vitamin preparations are ingested throughout the day to maintain maximum performance without "losing" any time for eating. Is that so smart?
3. COMMUNICATION
Analogue vs. Digital
An observation from one of today's most innovative office atmospheres, Google's Design Lab in Silicon Valley: light-flooded rooms with countless bar tables for conversations, discussions and presentations. Hanging or lying on the walls and tables are design variations, material samples and colour spectra. Workshop rooms and galleries are equipped with material libraries for comparison, modification and customisation. Bookcases everywhere offer both design classics and current inspirations. Here, the physical triumphs over the digital. And maybe it's no wonder given that the resulting products such as Google Assistant speakers are intended to adorn millions of homes and offices, where they have to constantly participate in the competition for equipment design. It is nonetheless interesting that almost everything in the design lab of today's most important digital company seems to take place in an analogue fashion. Laptops, monitors, and mobile phones are hardly to be seen, if at all. The interaction, discussions, contact with and through the designer make the difference. Smart here means materiality, accessibility, openness. Also smart here at Google are the so-called Human Refuelling Stations: room installations for workers to retreat to and meditate in order to recharge their batteries, clear their minds, and focus their thoughts, underpinned by personalised sound and lighting designs. Maybe a bit over the top, but seemingly very pleasurable for the users.
Archive vs. Data Cloud
In the past, there were archives with shelves that were miles long; today there are server rooms. And while at some point shelves become full, the storage capacities of the digital age are almost infinite: by 2025 the worldwide volume of data could increase tenfold again, to 163 Zettabyte. That's 163 followed by 21 zeroes! Even though we maybe shouldn't trust this forecast blindly (perhaps more in the direction of 22 zeroes?), it is becoming clear that the perspective on archiving will change fundamentally. If, according to Foucault, the archive is described as the "game of rules", this set of rules needs to be redefined in light of the advent of digital archives. The digital processing of data requires a new logic, or a new concept of the archive, namely one that preserves data as information. It could also be said that data is only relevant if the information available in it can be found at any time. But an archive is also a place of constant knowledge transformation: whether through decay, oblivion or destruction. Whereas archives used to be attributed the three basic tasks of collecting, archiving and presenting, today's technologies and developments offer the possibilities of networking, collaboration and distribution - and while archives were previously rather restricted and reserved for specialist audiences, new technologies could also open them up to the general public. The ideal archive of the future prepares content in such a way that users can access it at any time and for any purpose. And then it is smart. Unfortunately, this is still somewhat rare today.
Flipchart vs. Smartboard
The flipchart is an all-purpose weapon that hasn't even been replaced by the smartboard. Even though probably every user has at some time or another jammed their fingers while inserting a new roll of paper, the effect of a seminar room fully plastered with flipchart sheets is unparalleled. For this alone, the Smartboard offers no alternative. But for other things it does: no paper wastage, direct transfer to the computer, access for all participants, and a digital archive. Virtually every office (and almost every classroom in the meantime) already has a Smartboard. Even though not a few of them have been defaced by permanent markers, and one or the other is probably just standing around in a corner for this reason, they are an indispensable part of everyday office life. Analogue and digital complement each other perfectly today and in the future. This is also confirmed by current findings in cognitive research: we humans learn via all our senses. Those who artificially limit themselves when learning or working on projects tend to be at a disadvantage. Smart in this context then is anyone who not only has redundant systems and uses them, depending on the context and level of knowledge, but who also doesn't limit themselves to one medium. The best results are achieved when the entire portfolio of media and materials is used to the full.
Face to Face vs. Conference Call
With Pixar's headquarters, Steve Jobs developed the prototype of an office with a spatial design that was primarily oriented towards promoting opportunities for chance encounters. To this day, Pixar is regarded as one of the most creative companies, whose success can to a large extent be attributed to architecture. Steve Jobs' legacy - the Apple headquarters that opened about one and a half years ago - also embraced this approach as a guiding principle. The Infinite Loop, with a 12-hectare park inside the loop, can be understood as a lobby that encourages spontaneous encounters and shared walkways. The positive effect of this random communication is now also supported by scientific findings. Where do decisive breakthroughs, important ideas or innovations take place today? Not at the microscope or in front of a computer, but at the conference table, at the vending machine, and in the corridor. Direct communication and exchanges about projects therefore arise through specific spatial settings that facilitate random encounters. In addition to communication rooms, employees also need free time, which is made available for interaction. When more and more meetings are scheduled, this is unlikely to encourage impromptu encounters. So smart is when all employees are given the space and time to meet by chance in unpredictable places and at unpredictable times.