How We'll Work in 2025 | Slideshows (http://www.fastcompany.com/pics/how-well-work-2025#0)

I know it's a far fetched idea. But I think the idea is really cool and would work well with the young, creative class. If someone is going to build some spec space in C2S. I hope they would consider something like this.

Interesting stuff. As for myself, I don't have a cube or office. I work in a large conference room that is dedicated to our project. Since I am on the project 100% of the time I sit in the same place every day. I have no filing cabinet, no places to put pictures, or anything else. I use my computer for all of that. Everything I need fits in one drawer in a credenza that is in the conference room. (i.e. I don't take my mouse and mouse pad home at night).

For people that are on our project part-time and other projects part-time, they decide in the morning where they are going to be located for the day. If they are going to spend 75% of their day on my project they sit with me. If they only plan to spend 10% of the time working on my project then they go sit with their other team. They even switch location during the day – mornings with project A and afternoons with Project B.

Some days I sit by myself all day and other times the room is full. It seems to be working out.

Pretty cool looking. Where is that building?

Neat idea. There is a little bit of incubator space available around town, both in public and private locations, and more being planned. I know of angel investors and VCs who also make space available for early stage companies and entrepreneurs. But it sure ain't Sand Hill Road.

By my own observations and opinions and based on the opinions of ULI to the city regarding core2shore, dont expect any speculative office construction anytime soon.

You are right Metro about it working for the creative classes. As an accountant I totally sit at my desk looking at a spreadsheet on one monitor and my application software on another so this probably wouldn't work for me. Our software is web based, so in theory I could work from a lounge chair in Belize but that is not how it works in practice.

Even if spec office was viable right now, I'm not sure this kind of avant garde space is ideal for spec. Seems like something you would build for a specific company that wanted a creative space.

The problem with trendy architecture is that the building lasts longer than the trend.

I just hope for C2S and Lower Bricktown, people are smart enough to save back land for highly dense development that will occur once the critical mass has been achieved in residential. People attract people, trendy attracts people and availability of trendy activities attracts people. Once there are enough, downtown will attract business that right now is based in the 'burbs. We're not far from it so I hope they don't allow a lot of low-density housing. Mid- to high rise should be the rule for the redevelopment area. If it is successful, the critical mass will encourage and attract private development to the south and to the west that will take care of the low-density housing

and if they screw it up, we can always bulldoze things like bass pro, the one story building in lower bricktown, and other crappy developments not worth saving.

Talk about an inefficient use of space too. You'd have to pay more as a tenant than normal because it takes more space to get the same amount of work done.

And referencing the dot com industry wasn't smart....remember that went bust very quickly because it was so non-traditional business-like. You can only play around with air hockey for so long before you need to produce a product.

The worlds most efficient use of office space. Sometimes efficient isn't better.

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/xc/10075686.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=5047FA587DE1CADE0FF71CBC3CC61EB7118F6A2671712633 C0A6773CBCF99872

Talk about an inefficient use of space too. You'd have to pay more as a tenant than normal because it takes more space to get the same amount of work done.

And referencing the dot com industry wasn't smart....remember that went bust very quickly because it was so non-traditional business-like. You can only play around with air hockey for so long before you need to produce a product.
It didn't go bust because of the "non-traditional" workplace, it went bust because too many people threw too much cash at people who only had an idea and no real product to sell, so when it came time to show or go, they folded. Not too unlike land development boom/bust cycles.

A lot of the principles (minus the air hockey/ping pong tables) developed in the "active office" that came out of that era are popular. Quite a few of our clients come to our firm because of our experience with some of the ones that have become a standard in the industry. These are companies like Accenture and USAA, far removed from the "dot-com" world. In fact most of our work reduces the space required because no one has a "home office", they "travel" during the day depending upon tasks required. It works for some companies/industries and others wouldn't do very well. I don't think our industry would fare well with hoteling workstations but it worked for Accenture because most of the employees were coming in from out of town anyway.

The problem with trendy architecture is that the building lasts longer than the trend.

Unless today's trendy architecture becomes classic architecture 50 years from now. Imagine office space (like what Metro linked to) in Bricktown and people like us, 75 years from now, saying, "Don't tear it down! That's all that's left of the old Bricktown!"

I don't know how I'd function without my own office.

I don't know how I'd function without my own office.

In your case you might not be able to do it as I imagine you have lots of printed reference material and private conversations that directly pertain to work.

That's where the problems come in Kerry. How many jobs out there don't rely on a person having a certain amount of paper reference material at their desk required to do their job? Without a place to call "Home", it's a lot more difficult to do most jobs.

I will say that there are jobs where you don't need to be planted, but that's not the case for most...porbably 99% of them. Even in a paperless work place, how many times do you find a company that provisions cell phones as the inter-office comm.? Otherwise you don't want to plug your IP phone in while you're on the couch do you? Not to mention ergonomics...whew. And if you need to find someone to talk to about a problem...yet they move around every day? It's just a VERY specific niche.

Keep in mind that as we progress more technologically as a society, paper will become less and less necessary. Heck traditional PC's are already becoming extinct, and probably will be in 5 years, think Ipad on steroids, or probably holographic or projected true to life images (think Minority Report). And hey, if Moore's law continues to stay true, we'll hit the Singularity within the next 50 years or less and won't need an office, let alone one as we know it in the traditional sense.

Metro, I can't help but to be reminded of the 'what the world will be like 50 years from now' projections in the back of old PopSci magazines. The traditional PC is here to stay. As I sit in my office (where the door is often shut), I'm staring at my two 24" LCD monitors. I can't imagine doing my job, a large bit of which consists of research and writing without one monitor to spread out my word processor/spreadsheet and the other to show my research or email or docket sheet or whatnot.

Compared to my mouse and keyboard, the interface you saw on minority report (big 'ol touchscreens in 3D, yes?) looks like it'd be a pain.

Translucent screens hit the market this year on a laptop and MP3 players, I know it's all educated guess, but so far, Moore's law has panned out pretty darn accurate. I think within 5 years keyboards and traditional PC's will be near obsolete. It will start with tablet PC's like IPad, Slate, etc and continue to morph. Heck, Microsoft launced Microsoft Surface PC years ago but it's just now starting to take off in big business.

I think within 5 years keyboards and traditional PC's will be near obsolete. It will start with tablet PC's like IPad, Slate, etc and continue to morph.

Absolutely no way that in 5 short years that PCs and especially keyboards become obsolete. No one is going to want to type anymore than I am doing now on a digital keyboard such as the one on an iPad. It will be a very long time before we see the keyboard go away.

Absolutely no way that in 5 short years that PCs and especially keyboards become obsolete. No one is going to want to type anymore than I am doing now on a digital keyboard such as the one on an iPad. It will be a very long time before we see the keyboard go away.

I agree, for projects where a lot of typing is needed, the keyboard is far and away faster and easier.

I will say that the art of cursive writing is in the beginning stages of obsolesence, however. They are still teaching it to my son but I can certainly see that in 10 years it really may be unnecessary. I can't remember the last time I did a significantly long cursive writing project. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Speech-to-text software has come a long way in the last few years, heck I use it on my 1st gen Iphone and it's near flawless. In 5 years, the technology will have rapidly advanced.

Speech-to-text software has come a long way in the last few years, heck I use it on my 1st gen Iphone and it's near flawless. In 5 years, the technology will have rapidly advanced.

Most professional writers are going to still prefer the keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard has been around since the late 19th century. I don't care how many transistors and whatnot we have, the keyboard will stay with us.

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The Singularity Is Near - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_is_Near)

That's where the problems come in Kerry. How many jobs out there don't rely on a person having a certain amount of paper reference material at their desk required to do their job? Without a place to call "Home", it's a lot more difficult to do most jobs.

I went 99.9% paperless 11 months ago. On occasion I do need to print something out to reference while I work on a project but honestly, a second monitor would work for me just as well, and especially one that was touch screen so I could write notes on it. A few days ago I found a box that contained some old papers and it was a little hard for me to get rid of them because they were good reference material - but the reality is I didn't need them – at least in paper format.

If I find that I do need paper copies of something I can scan them and save them to my laptop. My laptop is connected to an automatic on-line back up so every document that hits my laptop is archived off-site in just a few seconds. I also use Microsoft Communicator for video conferencing and instant communication. Way better than a phone and it goes everywhere my laptop goes - even in the car driving down the highway. For group projects we use SharePoint to keep documents.

On a personal level, we also have a dog and we keep his shot records on both of our cell phones so if we ever need to put him in a kennel we just email the file to the kennel. No need for paper. My wife does use a notepad for the household budget but I find Quicken to be better.

The bottom line is - if you tried to go paperless you could. There is just an adjustment period.

That's where the problems come in Kerry. How many jobs out there don't rely on a person having a certain amount of paper reference material at their desk required to do their job? Without a place to call "Home", it's a lot more difficult to do most jobs.

I will say that there are jobs where you don't need to be planted, but that's not the case for most...porbably 99% of them. Even in a paperless work place, how many times do you find a company that provisions cell phones as the inter-office comm.? Otherwise you don't want to plug your IP phone in while you're on the couch do you? Not to mention ergonomics...whew. And if you need to find someone to talk to about a problem...yet they move around every day? It's just a VERY specific niche.
About 30% of the offices in the country have gone to the mobile office concept in some form. Most of the employees have company issued laptops and you basically register your location in the phone system so it finds you. I know at Accenture there was a three day limit that you could stay at one desk. It works well for a collaborative type of work environment, the whole thing is if you are in a "team" working on something (like a software module) then you reserve a huddle room, if you have more people you reserve a small or large conference room. They also have "isolation rooms" which are enclosed offices for "heads down" type of solo work.

You are correct that it requires the right type of situation and doesn't work for all. We have typically been able to fit a program into 70-80% of the office space that a typical office/cube farm goes into and about 50-60% of what would be office based with a few admin cubes. Since we are dealing with so many large documents and higher end PC's for specialized functions it would be harder to apply to our office, I just wish we could do bigger cubes so we could have some layout space, 30x42 sheets eat up a lot of desk space.

Most professional writers are going to still prefer the keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard has been around since the late 19th century. I don't care how many transistors and whatnot we have, the keyboard will stay with us.

There's no doubt about that Midtowner. In my job it's often required to do fast work on my computer while talking to a customer on the phone. That would be impossible without the standard keyboard. As for a previous comment about cursive writing when I want to send some kind of a personal note to a customer I still feel that something in cursive is much more personal and shows that I give more attention to them instead of some standardized form. People like to feel that they are special.

My office is in medical billing...I'll tell you, the more we try to move to an all electronic system and get rid of paper, the more paper we make.

I'll say this, hospitals are completely stupid when it comes to how to handle an electronic medial record. You might see someone running an EMR in th facility, but half the time they print the crap out and don't keep it in the system....or send electronic data for their billing companies....ugh very frustrating.

I'll say this, hospitals are completely stupid when it comes to how to handle an electronic medial record. You might see someone running an EMR in th facility, but half the time they print the crap out and don't keep it in the system....or send electronic data for their billing companies....ugh very frustrating.

It isn't just hospitals. When I worked in a Human Resources department and we first started using SAP one of the managers told her employees to screen print every data entry screen before saving the record so there would be a paper copy on file. Some people just don't get it. It took me nearly a year to get people to stop doing that.

The reliance on paper is driven by those in charge of protecting themselves from potential litigation and the attitude that electronic records can be manipulated. Paper is still king in court. I think it will still take another generation before "going paperless" is a possibility. In some industries like architecture/construction I think there will always be a need for some of it.

The reliance on paper is driven by those in charge of protecting themselves from potential litigation and the attitude that electronic records can be manipulated. Paper is still king in court. I think it will still take another generation before "going paperless" is a possibility. In some industries like architecture/construction I think there will always be a need for some of it.

All we need is a few more year of retirements. From my observations, there are just a few sticks in the mud that keep "paperless" from being implemented at a lot of place.

I helped put in an Employee Self-Service module at a company but then had to turn it off because the system allowed employees to update their own home address. The HR manager was afraid people would enter the wrong address and had them fill out a paper form instead. I guess she thought people could handwrite the correct address but they couldn't type it in.

As for architecture/construction - just wait until someone invents digital paper (my own idea). My idea for digital paper is a flexible LED sheet that comes in standard paper sizes, but you only need one sheet. For construction plans you could have a book with 20 digital pages and upload plans to it. This would give you the ability to have an unlimited number of electronic pages all in one single 20 page book. This would allow you to compare multiple pages just like you do know with regular paper. You could even write notes on it with a stylus and send those notes to other people in the office and have them show up on the same page for them.

That is why I said a generation, there are still some younger ones who learned at the hand of older ones who are still "old tech" and don't want to give it up. Some I think do it out of self-preservation.

We do a lot with PDF's internally with contractors and consultants but eventually it all ends up on paper for permitting, financing, construction and such, the cities and the banks still rely on paper. We use PDF's for comments quite a bit. We do print many fewer sets than we did 10 years ago. We deal with a few contractors that will work with the Revit models but none of those projects have reached construction phase yet, the projects were halted because of the economy.

I helped put in an Employee Self-Service module at a company but then had to turn it off because the system allowed employees to update their own home address. The HR manager was afraid people would enter the wrong address and had them fill out a paper form instead. I guess she thought people could handwrite the correct address but they couldn't type it in.


Actually, people are more prone to making mistakes in typing compared to handwritten information.

Actually, people are more prone to making mistakes in typing compared to handwritten information.

Someone has to type it into the system. As Bluedog pointed out - it was purely a self-preservation act. But lets say you did make an error typing in your own home address, the system sent a confirmation letter and/or email (depending on your prefered method of contact) to verify you updated the record correctly. A paper form doesn't do that.

Someone has to type it into the system. As Bluedog pointed out - it was purely a self-preservation act. But lets say you did make an error typing in your own home address, the system sent a confirmation letter and/or email (depending on your prefered method of contact) to verify you updated the record correctly. A paper form doesn't do that.

I'm certainly not arguing that we should go back to handwritten paper documents but in reality paper forms can do everything that computer forms can do just drastically much slower. Another good argument for typing information is that you don't have to worry about being able to read it. Many people's handwriting is totally impossilbe to read.

The ‘occasional office’ is open for business in Oklahoma City
CrossRock Place offers temporary space without traditional lease
BY RICHARD MIZE
Published: May 1, 2010
Modified: April 30, 2010 at 7:46 pm

The virtual offices are actual, actually, at CrossRock Place — just not permanent.

Or long term. Or short term, for that matter.

The offices, conference rooms, mailboxes, common areas and usual accoutrements are real. What’s not realistic is a traditional lease if all a business or individual needs is temporary space.

Keeping up appearances is what it’s all about, said Tyler Ward, owner of Cres LLC, which is offering CrossRock Place Executive Suites and Virtual Offices, where space is let under traditional leases or for occasional needs.

The two-story, 50,064-square-foot office building is at 3600 NW 138, northeast of the Kilpatrick Turnpike and N Portland Avenue.

The Class A building, built in 1994 by Continental Group Investments and remodeled in 2008, is in one of the midrise office parks north of the turnpike fronting Memorial Road. Medallion Management, part of Ward Family Cos., manages the building.

The virtual concept "allows a business owner, no matter how small, to enjoy a lavish office setting, one previously only dreamed about, with all of the amenities of a very expensive office suite,” manager Lesley Mustari said.

Ward said he’d heard of such arrangements in other parts of the country, but they are run by national companies, not local ones.

"We thought it was something that could work here” for small or home-based businesses and individuals and out-of-town businesses with need of an Oklahoma City presence, marketing manager Whitney Ward said.

One office broker worried that offering such temporary space is an invitation to fly-by-night companies.

Mustari said, "We do the same due diligence we do for occupying tenants, which includes reviewing financial information and/or references during the lease application process. This normally weeds out the illegitimate or shady enterprises.”

Vicki Knotts, an office specialist with Grubb & Ellis-Levy Beffort, said she knew of no other office property locally that was being offered on a "virtual” basis.

At CrossRock, $149 per month gets an address, mail forwarding and a phone line with call forwarding or voice mail, and two days per month of office usage. Conference room access comes at an hourly rate. The $279-per-month package offers the same services but includes a conference room for four hours per month.

Knotts wondered why a small business couldn’t afford an executive suite under a six-month lease.

Not everybody needs it — not the attorney nor the public relations professional already using the virtual space, nor the Mustang energy company considering an occasional Oklahoma City presence, Whitney and Tyler Ward said.

NewsOK (http://newsok.com/the-occasional-office-is-open-for-business-in-oklahoma-city/article/3457987?custom_click=lead_story_title)

Of course the traditional broker trying to sign people to leases doesn't "get it", they want to lock people in and don't market that type of arrangement.

Regus (http://www.regus.com/) is the national company that I know of, they have six locations here in Austin that have this type of arrangement.

Bluedog, I'm familiar with the Regus facilities in Dallas. I once had a meeting with someone in one of their conference rooms at a nice office tower near the old Pizza Hut headquarters in Addison. I think this new setup here in Oklahoma City offers a lot of possibilities for those who freelance or are otherwise self-employed. I wish the new owners the best of luck.

Yeah, but it'd be nice if we had a facility DT besides the Coop