Designing from evidence, not aspiration. Is your workplace a living lab?

Space is always speaking. If nobody has moved the furniture in months, is that a sign of contentment ?

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?