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The office of 2015
The workplace of the future will be more in tune with employees' needs, providing greater interactivity, connectivity and security
- By Catherine Rankin Harper, Feature Writer
- Published: 00:03 October 19, 2008
- Current research appears to be very much geared towards making the office more user friendly.
- Image Credit: Microsoft
More than 30 years ago Business Week published an article entitled The Office of the Future – a vision of what office technology would be like in 1995, complete with paperless systems and documents available at the touch of a button.
Documents are indeed now available at the click of
a mouse, although paper is still very much a feature of the modern office, but fast forward to 2015 and how much of your office will remain recognisable?
Current research appears to be very much geared towards making the office more user friendly and allowing greater interactivity between workers, whether or not they are in close physical proximity to one another.
Interactive spaces
IBM Research, along with Steelcase, undertook a project named Blue Space beginning in 2002, to develop an office set-up more in tune with workers' needs — one that provided discretion, privacy when needed and connectivity when required — and one far more responsive and interactive than today's office.
The project featured technology that lets you walk into your office and be recognised by your identification badge, while software adjusts the temperature to your preferred level and notifies your colleagues that you are back at your desk.
You can then choose to remain available or display ‘do not disturb' outside your cubicle. Should you wish to interact with colleagues, whether in your office or elsewhere, a software application uses sensor data to establish who is available, notify others and connect team members.
One-touch technology then allows you to choose whether to communicate via phone, e-mail or instant messaging.
Pervasive connectivity
Over in the Microsoft camp, the Microsoft Office Information
Worker Board of the Future brings together university students from around the world to discuss changes to the office environment and predict trends over the next decade. Meeting in 2005, the Board suggested a number of key factors that will affect working environments by 2015.
Pervasive connectivity will provide the ability to choose where and when to work; user interfaces will become more organic and adaptive; and home and office technology will merge to
the point where boundaries cannot be defined. A permanent exhibition centre named the Center for Information Work (CIW) can be found at Microsoft's corporate headquarters campus in Redmond, Washington, USA, showcasing innovative productivity software at least five to seven years away from widespread use.
The technology is exhibited through a fictional company, with CIW visitors role-playing the parts of employees
to interactively demonstrate how the technology will be used.
One technology featured at the CIW is the StraTech monitor, which is so large it partly wraps around your desk and allows you to view and access a number of applications at once.
All e-mails, voice mails, faxes and instant messages are displayed and can be sent to wherever the user needs
them — in the car, on a mobile communication device or even on an aircraft. Messages can also be grouped together and quickly uploaded as a website to allow common access.
Meetings are arranged via RoundTable, with cameras webcasting participants to their remote counterparts, and utilising electronic whiteboarding to share whatever
is written on central boards or individual tablets.
Increased security
New security developments such as biometrics — utilising innate characteristics that are hard to copy such as fingerprints, voice prints, retinal scans and typing patterns to identify users — are also on display at the CIW.
With such emphasis on developing technology to enhance portability and mobile communication, it seems a very real possibility that the office of 2015 may be a table at your local coffee shop, the sofa in your front room or even seat 1A on a jet somewhere over the Atlantic.
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