For most of workplace design history, we designed collaboration spaces for one type of interaction: human with human. That is no longer the full picture. Gartner projects that by 2029, half of all knowledge workers will develop new skills to work with, govern, or create AI agents. The implication for space design is profound. We are now designing for three modes simultaneously — human with human, human with agent, team with agent ensemble. Most current briefs address none of these directly and only address aspiration.

The best workplaces are designed from evidence.

How well do you know your organisation's actual behaviours (where people actually go, what they avoid, what they quietly work around) and what these reveal about the gap between intention and experience?

What design research are you undertaking to map how people work, where collaboration breaks down, which office rituals epitomise your firms culture ?

Microsoft's Future of Work research throw up another challenge, AI works well for individuals, but not yet for teams.

Accordingly, AI risks widening the human-to-human collaboration gap if it replaces social engagement rather than augments it.

So the design research questions are not abstract. How well do you actually know your organisation's behaviours? Where does collaboration break down? Which rituals hold your culture together and which environments quietly undermine them?

I believe the organisations getting this right are the ones treating their workplace as a living lab: testing space types, tracking experience quality and iterating on what the evidence reveals.

Interested to discover what design research occupiers are undertaking to challenge existing perspectives, push boundaries of conventional thinking and make better decision-making. Has anyone captured pre and post AI behavioural patterns .. what does the evidence tell you ? ... is it time to start distinguishing between AI-prominent and AI-ambient spaces?

Brief was explicit from the start. Our people told us in workshops, in surveys, in the focus groups we ran across every business unit that they wanted more collaboration space, more informal touchdown areas and a workplace that felt less like endless rows of desks and more like a place to attract talent and draw employees back with great choice of workplace settings.

We listened. We reduced individual workstations by 30 percent. We introduced generous collaborative zones on every floor, writable walls, flexible furniture, the full palette of contemporary workplace design thinking and we also invested significantly in the social and communal areas.

Our post-occupancy data was positive, however it did highlighted a few issues with noise levels remained high despite months of considered design and it also showed a disconnect between size of collaboration spaces and collaborative behaviour.

Three q questions I would genuinely value peer perspectives on -

How do you manage the acoustic brief, including through value engineering ?

Has anyone successfully designed for spontaneous interaction, and if so, what decision made the biggest difference? Every case study I have read usually features a great staircase or an amazing coffee break out zone. Interested to learn about other intentionally or accidentally discovered design ideas.

And finally the question in the forum heading, which single design decision most changed how your people actually work?

Extract below from Anthony Slumbers Blog entitle "Cities, AI and the Metaverse? Risks, Opportunities, Actions"  [The Blog - Antony Slumbers]

Dynamic workplace layouts:   AI can analyse data on how employees interact with their physical environment, identifying patterns and trends that can inform the design of adaptive, flexible workplace layouts. This can help create office spaces that foster collaboration, creativity, and productivity while still providing areas for privacy and focused work when needed.

Has anyone developed or procured an AI-powered space planning software tool to do this ?

How should the building design briefing process be reimagined in a new world of remote and distributed work ?

Interested to compare ideas on ways to assess space, workplace and occupancy needs.

Whilst corporate occupiers will need to prioritise flexibility, well-being and more sustainable work-life balances for those employees seeking to limit their days spent at the office, they will likely also need to consider what type of new amenities to introduce to create a compelling offer capable of pulling employees back!   

Will be interesting to see range of ambition as corporates start reimaging their future footprint and space requirements, expect some good news here for space as a service operators.

Will others follow Standard Chartered's lead in giving their employees more flexible and a choice of locations from which to work ?   Expect many more pilot projects ahead ... as well as a few lessons to be learnt! .... will profitability and productivity be affected ? ... what are the compliance challenges ?  ... how you you effective support and managed an increasingly distributed workforce?  ... should salaries be cut to reflect lower commuting costs and less time in the office?  .... what space collaboration software and tools will be required to support the effective utilisation of a smaller corporate footprint?  

Corporate real estate is clearly becoming more strategic than ever before and as such the CRE executive need to be at the table with internal HR, IT & Finance departments actively championing ideation and co-creation exercises with a view to reimaging how their corporate footprint becomes an employee benefit and what types of new occupation performance measures and data insights should be tracked to enable progress to be measured.