Tailorable blog

First impressions of working in a professional playground

This week we officially opened our Future Workspaces team room. The philosophy of the room is that it is a flexible environment with zones that support & stimulate specific activities. We analyzed what we do as team and designed zones in the room that match these activities. The results is what we call “the professional playground”: a large room with plenty of space for brainstorming, desks for individual work, a pressure-cooker meeting space and a couple of comfortable chairs for an informal talk.

Obviously, this is not “business as usual” for our organization; it took a while before we managed to get a room for the experiment and approval to do things our own way. Fortunately, the IT department and two of our secretaries were so enthousiastic about the initiative they put a lot of effort in helping us create this working space. Doing things your own way also meant that we had to select and buy everything ourselves, from our desks to the plants. However, sharing pizza while constructing IKEA desks is a great team-building excersise. 

In the spirit of Web 2.0, we consider the room a “perpetual beta”. Most notably, the high benches for the meeting space are still under construction and our smartboard is not so smart yet, as it still lacks the foil to create an interactive whiteboard. And perpetual beta also means that as the team members and our activities change, the room may have to change as well. We just see what works and what not.

These first days, I notice that we use the big whiteboard (2.40 x 4.80 m) with the cubes to sit on for almost all team activities. For individual concentrated work, I like working with my laptop in the comfy chairs. Sharing a room with four people obviously requires a bit of coordination, especially when one has a deadline to meet. Fortunately, most of our deadlines are aligned, so I do not expect much issues there. In terms of technology, we are experimenting with a wireless beamer, smart phones, chumbies and a few nabaztags, but somehow we have not focussed much on those yet.    

Check my Flickr set for some of the images of the room and the opening session.

What are the ingredients of your ideal office workspace?

(Cross-posted on the Future Workspaces team blog)