The office is broken: Can conceptual “atom smashing” repair it?

The best employees have more options now than ever before, and they’re not going to work for companies that make them shave, get dressed, hop into a car or a crowded subway, and sit at a desk in an office five days a week with their headphones on trying to avoid distractions and get work done.

This sudden interest in workplace experimentation is both welcome and needed, as much about how we work in the knowledge sector today is ossified into tradition and conventions, some of which are arbitrary and some of which are borrowed from different, older types of work. The proposals making waves at the moment, however, feel somehow insufficient

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Indy had founded an organisation called Dark Matter Labs as an architecture-practice-meets-think-tank- meets-innovation-consultancy (my summary) when he realised that the kind of housing projects he wanted to develop – projects that prized community and human connection – were virtually impossible within the framework of contemporary property right

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our hope at work may be for a quiet corner out of the mainstream rush of a world that refuses any longer to play fair. Knowing we may be left behind in the fiery rush of the company as it lifts off for another continent, the very deadness of an organization may seem like a welcome respite when faced with the swift-moving nature of postmodern busine

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The building was praised for throwing people at random. Because people were getting lost all the time and wandering into places they did not want to go. the building was a low rise and sprawling, which meant that conversations in corridors where a genuine conversation could develop rather than the eternal home of the glib, the elevator. More import... See more