1. business and industrial

MAKING SPACE FOR OTHERS
A resource for anyone who wants
to create a better workspace. This
report* tries to understand how
the socio-economic factors that
spawned coworking will continue
to affect our workspaces for the
better - and with this create tools
to make it happen.
*This report was completed as the final project
of my Masters Degree at Hyper Island
Words by Katy Jackson
suninthecorner.com
www.makingspaceforothers.com | Feb 2013
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03Introduction
07
Chapter 1 - On Structure
15
Chapter 2 - On the People
21
Chapter 3 - On Physical Space
27
Chapter 4 - On Community
32
Chapter 5 - Coworking
38
Chapter 6 - Economic Effect
42
Chapter 7 - What’s Next
47
Chapter 8 - On Conclusions
50
Appendix 1 - Sources
55
Appendix 2 - Resources*
*Any FIG. references can be found here
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this
report is to discuss the
spaces in which we work
with others, specifically,
coworking spaces.
There is no doubt that we are entering a new phase of society,
aren’t we always? This particular time sees a set of circumstances
that are having a positive affect on the spaces we work in. - We’re
living in an information society, on the cusp of the knowledge
economy where our know-how is as much an economic resource
as our labour, the first generation of digital natives are entering
the workplace, the global job market is in the news every day
and half of all college graduates can’t find work. We hold in our
hands these amazing new tools for sharing and communicating;
the mobile internet and the cloud. Recent years have seen the
rise of collaborative consumption due to the efficiency of peerto-peer exchanges in our networked world. Most significantly, by
2015, the world’s mobile worker population will reach 1.3 billion,
representing 37.2% of the total workforce according to a report
from the IDC in January 2012. - These socioeconomic factors have
resulted in a new crop of work spaces which is only now able to
see it’s own data and evaluate it’s own existence … a young market
that is yet to see it’s failures these circumstances that surround the
emergence of coworking spaces will continue to affect the spaces in
which we all work.
Text: The two key components I have found that will change the
future of where we work are Community and Knowledge. I will show
how I came to these and look at how they might continue to effect
where we work.
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This report when not stated otherwise is based on observations of my
time in a coworking space and studying workspaces for a period of 12
weeks. When discussing the future of workspaces in Chapter 8 and
9 I have drawn these conclusions, which are my own thoughts and
opinions, based on my observations and research.
Coworking is a difficult word to pin down and is defined by some in
different ways. I will attempt to be consistent in my use of the word
and it is important to first define in the context of this report what a
few terms are referring to:
Coworking: The deliberate choice to not work alone.
Coworking space: A dedicated communal space and facility for
coworking.
A Space: The physical space in which people do the work they
are either solely pursuing as Independents or contracted for.
Independents: People who are not dependant on a single
employer, investor or shareholder.
INITIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS
What are the key components of a successful work space?
Who uses and what are the benefits of using coworking spaces?
What will happen next to the spaces we work in?
BACKGROUND
As of this month (November 2012) Deskmag released the results
of their 3rd annual coworking survey which showed the number of
coworking spaces has doubled in the past year and it doesn’t look like
the growth will diminish any time in the coming few years.
AIMS
This report will cover research needed to understand coworking and
can be used as a resource for others to view the differences in practice
and develop or change their own practices in improving workspaces
and communities. And if you are one of those folks, and you can’t
find what your looking for here you should head to the Coworking
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Google group or Coworking Wiki.
THE LIMITATIONS
This report was produced over the period the 12 weeks of my
internship. 12 weeks is not nearly enough to conduct an accurate
assessment of a movement in it’s early stages. The coworking
movement has it’s roots in open source therefore information
is constantly being made available and freely distributed on the
internet, there are few academic studies on the specific subject
and the information available is vast and contradictory. There are
however many people studying the concept and directly publishing
their studies online and in blogs, these sources have the most up to
date information available around the subject as it quickly develops.
The coworking movement in it’s early stages has yet to see any
catastrophic failures and is therefore difficult to study it’s future. The
number of participants in my interviews and surveys where not that
of a full blown study. Since the study was completed whilst working
partially from a coworking space, some degree of bias is unavoidable.
FORM
This report takes the form of eight chapters on different aspects of the
spaces, if you are reading this report as a resource in your research
to set up a coworking or other space you can utilise these chapters in
any order. They are as follows:
CHAPTER 1. ON STRUCTURE
All shapes and sizes: The spaces we work with others and the many
forms they take. Where I look at how the spaces we work in compare
to each other in structure, form and business model.
CHAPTER 2. ON THE PEOPLE
Hacking your job: Exploring the individuals involved and their
motivations. Where I explore the decisions that lead people into
coworking spaces and what types of people use these new workplaces.
CHAPTER 3. ON THE PHYSICAL SPACE
Open and closed doors: Creating a balanced environment for work
and collaboration. Looking at the differences in the physical spaces
we work in and how this affects the success, the work, the people.
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CHAPTER 4. ON COMMUNITY
Let’s get together: Communities and culture in the workspace.
This chapter looks at the importance of community, openness and
collaboration.
CHAPTER 5. ON THE GROWTH OF COWORKING
Coworking: Where did it all come from. A look at the history, current
situation and rapid growth of coworking.
CHAPTER 6. ON THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS
Sharing is caring: An economy of trust and other things.
Coworking is part of the boom in collaborative consumption, where
trust between strangers is earned online and Airbnb is taking the
world by storm. The coworking movement is booming in relation to
the economy’s downturn and the effect it has had on the job market,
people are choosing to create their own opportunities and choose the
place where they work.
CHAPTER 7. ON PREDICTIONS
Outward not inward: Communes for the digital age. A look at the
possible outcomes of the current situation and how it could effect the
future of work.
CHAPTER 8. THE CONCLUSIONS
Community and knowledge. Lessons learnt that can be applied to
coworking spaces to help succeed get to their goals and overcome
their obstacles. Findings in relation to the research questions.
APPENDIX 1 - SOURCES
As well as these 8 chapters I have included some other useful research
and academic sources.
APPENDIX 2 - RESOURCES
Resources for developing or changing practices in improving
workspaces and communities in the form of case studies, links and
infographics.
PARTICIPANTS AND DATA
During the course of the study I interviewed 09 coworking spaces,
surveyed 07 coworkers. Other prominent sources of data and study
include the Deskmag surveys, the coworking project, the coworking
wiki and the coworking google group. A full list of sources can be
found in the appendix.
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CHAPTER 1 - ON STRUCTURE
All shapes and sizes:
The spaces we work
with others and the
many forms they take.
Here I look at the variety of workspaces, their structures,
configurations and their functions. Comparing them to each other
and exploring the business models therein. I look a little at what
happens when a space fails to stay open.
FIG 1 – Working in spaces with others connectedness infographic
The intro to this report states I will “discuss the spaces in which we
work with others” and here’s where I should clarify. This is specific to
the kinds of spaces that replace our offices, spaces that have evolved
and new spaces that have emerged where we find ourselves working.
I have categorised these spaces and how they relate to each other
and how connected we are to the people around us from social or
neighbourly connection (purple) to new connections that have value
to our work (red). In this infographic. FIG 1 There are:
LABS
Labs are being created by large corporations to take advantage
of the lean model, they are separate from the top down, CEO
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filled traditional structure of the parent company, Labs are where
innovation roams free, Advertising companies (BBH), Tech
companies (Google) and even retail (Norstrom) and Newspapers
(New York Times) have adopted the new Lab structure within their
companies.
UNIVERSITY LABS
Not the science kind - These are innovation labs, where students
from a variety of disciplines, can come together, in a highly charged
environment to solve common problems, brainstorm and create
ultimately the future start-ups and transformative ideas. Currently
some of these are, The Harvard iLab, The MIT CoLab and Media
Innovation Lab, The Stanford Peace Innovation Lab.
INCUBATORS
Business Incubators started around the 1960s and are designed
to support start-ups and entrepreneurs with development - They
provide all the basics and the structure they need to get going,
without the start-ups necessarily having the expense of hiring their
own lawyer for example. they are fast, high growth programs to get
businesses on their feet, Incubators often host a number of small
start-ups at once and they sometimes work alongside each other in
the programme, almost like a school for start-ups.
TOUCHDOWN SPACES
This refers to the established workstations and corporate virtual
offices, executive suites & touchdown service concepts that have been
around for 30 years or so, the biggest name in the business is Regus.
THE OFFICE
I put this in as a means of comparison, we all know every office is
different but somehow they are all the same. Let’s take wikipedia’s
description for now: “In modern terms an office usually refers to the
location where white-collar workers are employed.”
HOME
Working at home in your own home office, either as part of a
distributed team, as a remote worker or as an independent business
or solopreneur.
COFFEE SHOP
Where the home worker often finds themselves. Or the office worker
looking for a ‘Third space’ to cure the doldrums of a working day.
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COFFEE SHOP +
There are other Coffee shops which start to verge on coworking
spaces, these are the small independent, more likely community
coffee shops that see the potential in the remote workforce and offer
up the best wifi, small tables and sockets-a-plenty, I’ve named them
here as ‘Coffee shop +’.
COLLECTIVES
An older model, historically this would have been artists. Collectives
differ from coworking spaces in that they usually have a co-op
business model, they all invest in space together, they are more often
than not made up of people in the same discipline, a way of banding
together to create a stronger voice than a lone freelancer.
THE JELLY
A gathering, a casual working event where people get together in a
coffee shop or a persons home. A popular solution to not working
alone “We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting
people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of.” Often
Jelly events if a strong group bonds can lead to a coworking space
being established.
COWORK LAB OR COWORKING FOR INNOVATION
Another model I’ve witnessed in my studies is a new breed, born
of big businesses foreseeing the value of coworking, this model
uses coworking as a means to innovate, it allows certain types of
business to have a permanent place where they can study their
users and much like the Lab model they can innovate and change
practices without having to deal with the structure of an entire
corporation, these are places to experiment with customer service,
usage patterns… whatever they like, it’s the fastest way to innovate.
examples of these places are NextDoor in Chicago run by StateFarm
Insurance and conceived by IDEO, Google campus in London and
ING Cafes situated in various locations around the world. Then there
is American express who situate themselves in a coworking space
with similar aims “We try to learn from companies,” she continues,
speaking of the customers she serves. “Not only because I’ve fallen
in love with them, but because they inspire us to get to know them
better.” To that end, American Express OPEN took up residence at
one of the co-working spaces owned by tech incubator WeWork Labs.
“We do that so our team can walk outside their little glass cube and
interact with business owners who are around them and say, ‘What
do you think about this or that?’” Her team also works closely with
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another co-working space, General Assembly.**4.25** (Google think
quarterly)
COWORKING SPACES
Lastly in our graphic we have coworking spaces, which are a little
harder to define…
In May 2012 the Journal of Business and Technical Communication
published the paper Working Alone Together: Coworking as
Emergent Collaborative Activity **5.1** and it is one of the very few
published studies specifically on coworking. The paper reports on a
2-year study of 9 coworking spaces in Austin Texas. In the research
they found many contradictions in what coworking was.
“As we examine how participants described the three aspects
of coworking—the object (what), actors (who), and outcome
(why)—we find contradictions in each. In fact, if we just look
at the activity system of coworking, we might even wonder
if coworking describes a coherent phenomenon at all. The
proprietors and coworkers seem to disagree at every point.” 5.1
FIG 2 – Working Alone Together 5.1 – Shortened Descriptors
Based on the varying definitions the researcher characterises the
spaces as community work spaces, unoffices, or federated spaces
FIG 2 These descriptors when placed against the now 2000* strong
number of coworking spaces around the globe doesn’t begin to help
us define the subtleties of difference in coworking space structure.
What this paper does give us is a useful set of two configurations of
coworking spaces The Good Partners FIG 3 where the relationship
is an inward one of collaboration and The Good neighbours FIG
4 where the relationship between coworkers is a neighbourly one,
where people work together for the community but don’t work
together on projects, if we look at these as not just configurations
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of coworking spaces but configurations of any space then we can
compare and contrast our selection of modern work place options.
If you look back at the infographic above FIG 1 you will see in what
situations the relationships will be of the good partners and good
neighbours type.
FIG 3 – Working Alone Together 5.1 - The Good Partners
Configuration
FIG 4 – Working Alone Together 5.1 - The Good Neighbours
Configuration
The book Working In The Unoffice 1.2 categorises coworking spaces
into roughly six different types, determined by the section of people
that they target: These categories are: Incubators Workshops/D-I-Y/
Hacker Spaces, Social Enterprise and Nonprofit Coworking Spaces,
Industry-Specific/Niche Coworking Spaces, Coworking Space for
Established Businesses, Satellite Spaces.
Because of the huge variety of spaces out there and the complexity
of the multitude of possible combinations of people, space, location,
network, industry combinations, sponsorships and structures there
simply can’t be sub categories of coworking spaces that do justice to
everyone. Even here in Working In The Unoffice 1.2 they say that
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“many spaces defy being pigeon-holed” and can fall into more than
one of their categories. Because of this and limited information on
the subject one of the most common questions on the coworking
google group is about business models, many people keen to start
up a new coworking space or struggling with the workload, or the
finances of their current space are inquiring about the working
models of others. By thinking of this more as a combination of
similar things which make up the whole of a coworking space I have
created the coworking business model generator as a tool for anyone
trying to define their business as a work space, Instead of lumping
into categories it helps to define the unique qualities of a space,
centring not around how they do it but why they do it by asking what
do you seek to do? and how will you bring value to your customers.
I created this as a tool to generate new models and come up with
creative solutions for adding value for your members, and creative
ways of distributing that value in a way that will either make you
money, help improve your community or attract members to your
space. The idea is to decide based on each section what you seek
to or what value you want to provide your renters and how you can
deliver these, you can brainstorm around each section to come up
with creative solutions. You should reevaluate the model on a regular
basis, there are always new value gaps you can provide solutions to
for your renters. It is not meant as a tools to make you money, but to
guide you to your business model and help bring the right value to
the right people you seek to work for. FIG 5
FIG 5 – Workspace business model generation tool
Then we have the spaces which don’t fit into this pattern, for example
coffee shop plus and NextDoor Cowork Lab in the infographic above
- these which do revolve around coworking but are not coworking
spaces (within my model) because they didn’t have an altruistic
starting point - the coworking space is a means to another gain,
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the coffee shop plus seeks to sell coffee and the value they bring is
coffee and coworking and they deliver it with late opening times and
power sockets, NextDoor in Chicago (See Appendix for Case Study),
the coworking lab as i’ve called it created by Statefarm insurance.
They seek to learn more about their customers, how they can better
engage them and give a better service they do this by providing cheap
coffee and coworking and free financial advice. They bring value by
creating a hub in the community. You can almost put these spaces
into the machine backwards - where a coworking space is a successful
byproduct.
As stated in the introduction coworking is yet to see it’s own failures.
There are however some spaces which have had to close. Megan Hunt
kindly answered a few questions about CAMP her coworking space
in Omaha, which closed in may 2012:
“The biggest pitfall I had with CAMP was that the space came
before the community. I tried to build a strong network of
support around the few core tenants I started with. As is normal
for a coworking space, they all eventually moved on, outgrew the
space, found new gigs and moved into other offices, etc, and I
wasn’t able to grow the membership roster beyond that.” Megan
Hunt 3.2
Community-building is one of the most cited challenges for these
work spaces, the spaces have high turnovers because of the nature
of the way a lot of renters use the space, it offers them a temporary
home especially when it comes to start-ups. 1871 in Chicago
anticipate this and plan for companies to spend only 6 month in their
space and hope that they move on to bigger and better things. 3.2
Megan’s biggest problem though was that “CAMP never had a
profitable month in the 22 months we were open.” Funded by Megan
out of her own pocket the space didn’t have a viable business model
that could keep them above water, whilst also loosing membership
without an outlet to promote the space. Megan’s problem can be seen
being asked about on the Google group often as people ask for advice
for similar situations. The value of this is that Megan’s lessons are
learnt publicly, as she shares her story of her space closure others are
able to learn from this.
TAKE AWAYS
A coworking space is what you make of it, but coworking is an act
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that can be moulded for it’s actors. The structure of a good space
should consider it’s membership, you can build a framework or
business model around what you know you can provide for your
members needs and they themselves will become your community.
Some spaces are not for everyone, and one size fits all will never
apply, people will find the work space that suits their needs and vice
versa, spaces should be aware of this kind of turnover. There is never
a right answer, our best lesson is to make use of the lessons learned
by others and the information provided by the community, kindly
people share their stories and their methods it would be rude not
to listen.
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CHAPTER 2 - ON THE PEOPLE
Hacking your job:
Exploring the
individuals involved and
their motivations.
For many people now is the moment to explore new ways of
creating opportunities for themselves and finding new solutions to
work and work spaces, here I explore the individuals involved in
these workspaces, The decisions that lead people into coworking
spaces and what types of people use these new workplaces. The
reasons that motivate the people who work in new spaces and the
reasons they create the spaces.
I interviewed a number of space owners during my research and
asked them what lead them to create their space:
“At the time it wasn’t really about coworking it was just about
getting people together and sharing and getting to know each
other and the result of doing that, for the better part of a year,
was that we all wanted to be around each other more often
including when we where working and so a physical place
started to make more sense… and along the way one of the
people I’d met was interested in partnering with me on that.”
Alex Hillman Interview 3.11
“Basically since I was just going crazy working out of my house
and if you go to a coffee shop the wifi sucks, Luckily some guys
that were involved in the old space here they still wanted to see
coworking happen, so we ended up in a space above a coffee
shop.” Nick Cowork Buffalo Interview 3.9
“A transitional stage in my career, looking to do something
different and at the same time our other investor Brian was
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working out of a space similar to this, a shared office setting.
We’ve been friends for a long time and we’ve always talked about
doing something out of the norm of the corporate business world
because we’ve both had jobs in a corporate setting. Coworking
feels like your taking a step away from that world and into a
world where you’re more in control of your own surroundings,
your own lifestyle, your own work environment so the general
feel of it was appealing to us so after learning a bit about the
space that Brian was in and what was inciting about it and
what was not so inciting about and we thought this is a good
opportunity to create something we really do like.” Patrick
Onward Coworking Interview 3.3
The common story with space owners is that they create the space
firstly from a personal need and secondly from viewing the people
around them with a similar need.
I gained an impression of the people who work in coworking
environments and their backgrounds by observations in The
Coop, Observations at spaces visited, data from DeskMag’s Global
coworking Surveys, The coworking google group and other anecdotes
from Working alone together and Working in the Unoffice. The
people in these workplaces are driven by common circumstances, I
have put together this infographic showing the common paths that I
have found lead to coworking. FIG 6
FIG 6 – Common paths to coworking infographic
According to DeskMag’s Third Global coworking Survey 2.2 53% of
all coworkers in 2012 where defined as Freelancers, The rest where
made up of: Entrepreneurs with employees 14%, Employees of small
companies 5 or less people 9%, Employees of companies with 6-99
employees 9%, 100 or more employees 6% and Other 8%.
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These freelancers, 1,2 and 3 in our infographic here, are what is
classed as the independent workforce, A recent report by The MBO
partners independent workforce index reported in September 2012
that the independent workforce in America had grown by almost 1
million workers in the last year, from 16 to 17 million and is expected
to reach 23 million in 5 years.
“The total independent workforce grew, and so too did the
projected future size of this workforce, to be as many as
23-million strong in the next five years.”
These independent workers are typically what’s known as knowledge
workers, people who ‘think for a living’ a knowledge worker typically
spends 38% of their time looking up information, the task of their
work being - “non routine problem solving involving convergent,
divergent and creative thinking.” 4.24 With a what tends to be a
background in education and often also the creative industries.
This is echoed in my case study at The Coop where the job spread
of my 7 subjects was: Service Community manager, P.H.D Student,
Consultant Statistician, Software Engineer, Web Developer, UX/
Product designer and an Illustrator. Coworking spaces suit these
people because they get the opportunity to work the way that suits
them without the pressure of the office environment or the boss
standing over your shoulder, for a creative thinker and problem
solver it can be more inspiring to be surrounded by people in other
fields, with varied knowledge than to be in the same space with
other people working on the same thing. As stated by some of the
participants at The Coop. 3.10
“Coworking is a good way to interact with people outside of my
own field”
“You meet people you would never come across normally”
One of the most interesting questions around coworking especially
for the uninitiated is what motivates people who have a home office
to pay for a coworking space instead? For the most part people are
driven by the social aspect of coworking. We are social beings, we
can’t help it. As we see in the infographic it’s a frustration of lack of
companionship and inspiration from others which could include
advice, feedback or just someone to brainstorm with.
“Our social nature even shows up in negation. One of the
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most severe punishments that can be meted out to a prisoner is
solitary confinement; even in a social environment as harsh and
attenuated as prison, complete removal from human contact
is harsher still. Our social life is literally primal, in the sense
that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the
primates, are also social.” (Here comes everybody) 1.5
Christoph Fahle a Founder Betahaus in berlin makes an interesting
statement in the film ‘People in Beta’ filmed by KS12. 2.7
“Most of my time I spent at university. I didn’t particularly
study there but I liked spending time there, and at the end of
my studies I thought, how could I have a similar surrounding
or similar place without studying. The things that are good
in university should continue in our lives. The way you meet
people… you spend time together on a course for like 3 months,
4 months and then you split, and then you meet new people
for 3 or 4 months, you do projects together and that was
an excellent pattern in my opinion, I never got bored.” 2.7
Christoph Fahle - Founder Betahaus
Though it hasn’t been mentioned much in research, I can see exactly
what Christoph is referring to as being a more underlying driving
force for the majority of people in these spaces, especially seeing as
the demographics currently in coworking spaces are mid twenties to
late thirties and the current population spends longer in school than
it has ever in history 4.2 University, especially with group work is a
place where your responsibilities are to yourself and to your peers,
which fosters more self expression and even productivity. From a
personal point of view I can see very much why he would want to
recreate that kind of structure for himself, coming from a university
situation where it was very much a community, having also been in
a more traditional work situation, the benefits of a good communal,
sharing, classroom environment you become aware of the pace of
renewal and learning that you can achieve in short time spans.
Why do I have to wake up early, why do I have to live and work on
someone else’s terms, we know how to work, we’ve spent all that time
in our lives self motivating, to do hours upon hours of school work,
college work, university work, yet we have to wake up for “The Man”
and that’s what it is, an old school fight back against “The Man”, but
it’s a fight that can be won by working hard, proving ourselves and
thriving.
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“Boomers (ages 50-66) chose independent work because they’re
fed up with the politics and lack of security in the traditional
workplace.” 2.3 The MBO partners state of independent
workforce index
Trust plays a big part here, a remote worker is trusted to spend the
amount of time working he or she says they will and to do the tasks
correctly and efficiently, to communicate and be honest. It is this
that will allow us to have a happy working situation, a bond of trust
between company & worker, freelancer & company, freelancer &
customer, coworker & coworker.
“The transition from Organization Man to free agent is both
a cause and a consequence of another profound economic and
social change: Power is devolving from the organization to the
individual. The individual, not the organization, has become the
economy’s fundamental unit.” 1.3 Free Agent Nation 2002
There are other people who’s first priority is not the social aspect
but the advantages it can bring to their company. It’s currently not
a common thing but it’s increasing. In some instances people are
placed, or place themselves in coworking environments because it
benefits their work to be around, knowledge workers and start-ups or
tech businesses. For example Susan Sobbott, president of American
Express OPEN says:
“We try to learn from companies,” she continues, speaking of the
customers she serves. “Not only because I’ve fallen in love with
them, but because they inspire us to get to know them better.”
To that end, American Express OPEN took up residence at one
of the co-working spaces owned by tech incubator WeWork
Labs. “We do that so our team can walk outside their little
glass cube and interact with business owners who are around
them and say, ‘What do you think about this or that?’” Her
team also works closely with another co-working space, General
Assembly”. Susan Sobbott in Google Think 4.1
Gigoam 4.20 points out the 5 reasons to put workers into coworking
spaces:
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1 Coworking is like a non-stop trade show.
2 Coworking provides office structure without office stricture.
3 Coworking encourages work-life balance.
4 Coworking is creative.
5 Coworking is human.
Spaces like 1871 in Chicago encourage residents from other
institutions and companies at the mutual benefit of their members,
they have a number of universities and brands who spend time in
the space, give lectures and in turn gain direct access to potential
investments and talent.
In chapter 1, on structure, I talk about what i’ve called “Coworking
labs”, Coworking spaces created as a means of innovation for bigger
companies like ING, StateFarm and Google to have access to their
customers. The driving forces here are mixed, these spaces tend to be
free drop-in coworking, which means no one is paying for a monthly
membership and the customers are less regular which provides a
more coffee shop, internet cafe type environment. Some of these
spaces offer free events and advice, for example Statefarm and ING
both offer free finance advice within their space, no obligation to take
it but it has been extremely popular, people prefer the environment,
how approachable it is in comparison to their bank branch. Currently
there seems to be no real downside to either party in this exchange
and they are a particularly good solution for smaller neighbourhoods
and communities, the community get a place to work with free wifi,
cheap coffee their not obliged to buy anything or take the free advice,
the space owners get a place where they can study how best to treat
and advise their customers, they can innovate outside the confines of
the normal structure of other branches. And other things come along
with this like brand awareness and brand loyalty.
TAKE AWAYS
When you cross digital natives with knowledge workers what you get
are individuals who are ready to engineer their own opportunities.
People cowork because other people cowork, it’s biggest selling point
is social, the idea benefits all parties, when you choose to work on
what you love and you choose to do that around people who can
broaden your mind then you have a happier work life balance. The
benefits are also starting to be seen by other industries and big
companies and coworking could become something you are asked
to do a few times during the week or month as part of your future
employment.
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CHAPTER 3 - PHYSICAL SPACE
Open and closed doors:
Creating a balanced
environment for work
and collaboration.
The physical space we work in is equally important to the quality
of our environment as the people around us. A bad space can have
such a dramatic effect on our work and productivity. Think of a
time when the office heating was broken or they moved your desk
to another part of the room, for how long and how much did it
effect your work?
Text: Opening a space for people to cowork involves also considering
how you design the right environment for people to feel comfortable
and also productive. It’s not an easy task, a work space needs to
encourage productivity, collaboration, comfort, serendipitous
interactions and spaces to think or be alone, It needs to make people
feel comfortable to be themselves if you have many people coming
and going regularly then the space needs to feel like you are part of
it, a sense of ownership can be hard when coworker turnover is high.
Then there are environmental factors, heating, air conditioning, white
noise, should you have music or no music?
Let’s start with Serendipitous interactions, the Harvard Business
Review article “Who moved my cube?” 4.3 explores the conclusions
from 12 years worth of research on the effects of design on
interactions. Over those 12 years they conducted 9 studies focussing
on organisations in the US , Europe and Asia. The conclusion comes
down to three dimensions or ‘affordances’ that have physical and
social aspects they are: Proximity, Privacy and Permission.
The article points out some interesting failures in office redesigns
that had otherwise good intentions. According to HBR “Common
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sense, it turns out, is a poor guide when it comes to designing a
space” One example is the Scandinavian Airlines, who redesigned
their head office around a central ‘Street’ along which they had a cafe,
offices, shopping and other facilities and multi-rooms containing fax
machines and photocopiers. They wanted this to promote informal
interactions but the results where that nothing changed, Only 9%
of interactions where happening in the “street”. While open areas
do bring people closer to each other, too much openness inhibits
exchanges because people feel exposed. They conclude that:
“The most effective spaces bring people together and remove
barriers while also providing sufficient privacy that people
don’t fear being overheard or interrupted. In addition, they
reinforce permission to convene and speak freely. … getting
the balance wrong can turn a well-meant effort to foster
creative collaboration into a frustrating lesson in unintended
consequences.” 4.3
You can read more about the The ‘three Ps’ of workplace collaboration
in the article http://bit.ly/Wqr6Lq
Serendipitous interactions are about that crucial conversation that
can lead to a great friendship or partnership that would not have
normally occurred. What, in the past the local coffee shop was a place
for, where you were free to be alone or to engage in chit chat, to read
the newspaper and know with some certainty that the person next to
you has probably read the same news article. Nowadays there are so
many platforms for news and current affairs that you’d be reluctant to
engage the person next to you in a casual chat about the news.
“The café provided an opportune space in which to create
relations based on spontaneous solidarity. This fleeting fraternity
rested on three values. The first was selectivity - that is, the
freedom of participants in café sociability to converse with
whomever they wished. The second value was autonomy - the
right not to be interrupted by third parties once you had begun
to talk with a particular person or group. The third involved the
idea of tolerance - that is, the concept that no one in the café
should take offence at the minor irritations and insults that
accompanied socialising in a small space amid a dense urban
agglomeration. (Haine 1996, p150) 5.3 An ethnography of a
neighbourhood café
22
This balance of choice between engaging with strangers explained
in this cafe example is exactly what is referred to by HBR above, it’s
the balance of Proximity, Permission and Privacy. Which is what any
coworking workspace should be looking to create, where the coffee
shop has lost somewhat in recent years.
Our behaviours in coffee shops changed when the pace of life
changed, when we started waiting in 10 minute queues for a cup
of average coffee and we became very passive consumers of coffee.
Third spaces are no longer what they used to be and we are filling
that gap with a new options. And the real coffee shops need to adjust
to suit the needs of their customers, and some do - I refer to them as
‘coffee shop +’ in chapter 1. They are making the necessary steps to
accommodate the wandering worker, reliable wifi, plenty of sockets
and small individual tables and cosy sofas. They often result in people
becoming regulars, increasing the chances of interaction between
customers, preserving that freedom to converse.
In his work The Great Good Place Ray Oldenburg wrote about “third
places”
“Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering
places. The phrase ‘third places’ derives from considering our
homes to be the ‘first’ places in our lives, and our work places the
‘second’” Ray Oldenburg
This meant everything from your hairdressers to your corner store,
community hall or coffee shop, a variety of different public spaces
that host regular voluntary, informal, happily anticipated gatherings
beyond the home and the workplace he also explains his belief that
these places are disappearing in modern United States and that
the decrease in availability of these community gathering spaces is
impacting our lives.
“Life without community has produced, for many, a life style
consisting mainly of a home-to-work-and-back-again shuttle.
Social well-being and psychological health depend upon
community. It is no coincidence that the ‘helping professions’
became a major industry in the United States as suburban
planning helped destroy local public life and the community
support it once lent.”
The paper The Coffee Shop: Social and Physical Factors Influencing
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Place Attachment tells us that coffee shop chains in the US grew by
more than 10% annually in comparison to 2% of fast food chains.
The paper looks at what qualities both physical and social, encourage
people to gather in those coffee shops and develop an attachment to
those places.
“Attachment to place involves the assessment of the current
setting, as well as the assessment of the relative quality of
alternative settings (Stokols & Shumaker, 1981). Higher
quality environmental settings are those that support the goals
and activities of the person (Stokols and Shumaker, (1982).
Stokols and Shumaker’s (1982) model of place attachment lists
neighbourhood, physical amenities, individual and household
characteristics, and social networks as important components of
place attachment.” 5.2
The paper goes on to say,
“Taylor (1983) propose a person-environment congruence model
of place attachment. This model suggests that place attachment
involves “expectations of stability, feelings of positive affect,
greater knowledge of the locale, and behaviours that serve to
maintain or enhance the location” 5.2
Interior design companies and service design companies are taking
this kind of research into account when designing new work spaces
and coworking spaces – as coworking has been largely experimental
up until the past few years only now are spaces opening where they
can begin to consider the physical space as part of the launch whereas
previously a space at all would have been enough. Older spaces are
also now established enough to reconsider their physical space and
look at how they optimise for their renters needs from the space.
“We don’t view it as an office that we provide it’s more like a
clubhouse that we participate in. When we opened we needed to
paint the walls put together furniture, we do that together and
value of that is people really feeling like this is more than a place
where people go to get their work done its something they are
part of they want to. ...when it came time to grow a year later we
said lets not forget our roots lets do that again it worked really
really well, so this time we went in with more intentionality and
looked at what worked and what didn’t” Alex Hillman Interview
3.11
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TILT, architecture practice are establishing themselves at the forefront
of collaborative space design , with a number of coworking spaces
under their belts and they will play a large part in The Downtown
project’s family of coworking spaces in Las Vegas. Their method
‘codesign’ involves the end users through a design thinking style
process. Using similar methods NextDoor in Chicago was developed
by IDEO “They had brought in IDEO to work on a shop space that would
suit younger customers, make them feel welcome and safe. And
it morphed into what they have now. IDEO built prototype
spaces in a 5000Sqft warehouse space and tested them before
they came up with the final product.” 3.7 BRETT MYRES Program Director @ NextDoor
These prototypes couldn’t be more important to the space, as
NextDoor is run by Statefarm insurance company, a balance between
the financial advice that they offer, their brand as a company and
offering a free space for the public to enjoy and utilise is extremely
important – you don’t want customers to look away because they feel
the space is a corporation’s attempt to get close to customers, they
should be aware that the space really is for them.
When some spaces have been around for a while and are more
established and have the basics of running their space in place they
start to add automated systems and screens or RFID chip cards etc.
NextDoor however found that the more tech you have the more you
distance yourself from your renters, and ultimately this harms your
community.
“The blackboard was going to be an interactive digital screen but
people didn’t respond well to it.
Why should I use that if I have my phone, to book from
wherever, I don’t want to come in and use your hardware.” 3.7
BRETT MYRES - Program Director @ NextDoor
It’s about paring things down to what’s necessary and a good
experience, which for your community to thrive should be a human
experience.
“In Coffee Shop 1, the favourite seats were sheltered somewhat
due to their placement along walls, or next to the edge of the
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second floor level, which essentially created a partial wall.
The only preferred seat not sheltered by some architectural
feature was the lone upholstered chair, reported to be the only
comfortable chair in the coffee shop. This upholstered chair was
moved frequently by patrons to accommodate their preferences.
In Coffee Shop 2, all the favourite seats except one were also
sheltered against walls or the counter. In Coffee Shop 3, the seats
along the walls were chosen first, with corner seats being the
most preferred.” 5.2 The Coffee Shop: Social and Physical Factors
Influencing Place Attachment
As I read this statement I sit in the Argo Tea cafe in Chicago and I
notice the layout. The designer has made some very clear decisions
based on exactly the point stated above. All but one table in the cafe
has been placed to include some form of shelter to the occupants,
with curved half walls erected in the middle of the room with sofas
attached to create more opportunity for seclusion and all other tables
against the windows and walls. FIG 7 The space is still communal
and you are around other people at that Familiar Strangers* level.
FIG 7 – Argo Tea shop sketch
TAKE AWAYS
Make space for community, consider interaction as the purpose of
the space, but don’t assume it’s all your space is for, a space needs
a balance of Proximity, Privacy and Permission. A human centred
design approach involving your renters in the process becomes part
of building your community. Its worth the time an effort you put into
considering the ‘experience’ your renter receives.
26
CHAPTER 4 - ON COMMUNITY
Let’s get together:
Communities and
culture in the
workspace.
Our workplaces are communities, our colleagues are our
neighbours, but where did neighbourliness go? Our new
workspaces are exploring community once again and waving
goodbye to the cubicle. This chapter looks at community-building,
openness and collaboration.
Some recent research I did on neighbourhoods for another recent
project has a lot of parallels with our coworking environments, the
relationship between members in a coworking environment is often
a neighbourly one - a view also shared by C. Spinuzzi in his paper
Working alone together (see infographics from chapter 1). What we
found When we looked at neighbourhoods in urban environments
was, that people where disconnected to their neighbours. They had
more trust in the people they would interact with on the internet,
They sometimes wouldn’t interact with their neighbours at all. We
found that every community could be dissected into Community
Leaders, Supporters and the Crowd, and that at each level required a
different kind of empowerment and action that was required of them.
Because people had no connection to their neighbours they where
not always compelled to look after their building or surrounding area.
Neighbourliness was often successful when there was a champion, a
community leader who would act and inspire others to act much like
described by Clay Shirkey in Here comes everybody, the easiest step
is to share, action becomes the most difficult:
“You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of
activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social
27
tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing,
cooperation, and collective action. Sharing creates the fewest
demands on the participants.” 1.5 Here comes everybody
FIG 8 – The ladder of community activity
Also neighbourliness was successful when people needed the
resources of others, when you need to borrow something - Here are
the people who are need me they do all these things that could be
of value to me but if I don’t speak engage them i will never know
and it will be a missed opportunity. There are many projects out
there trying to solve this problem of disconnect out there and they
all come to similar conclusions of inclusion and empowerment, but
also of shared resources of skill share the ability to view the skills of
others, to see what available resources could be round your corner,
interestingly Alex Hillman mentions in my conversation that,
“The difficulty was being able to find people to add to that
network, because it was very dependant on having trust and
relationships with people that I could collaborate with so I
started looking elsewhere beyond my own backyard and found
that it was easier to find people in other cities than it was in my
own and that was weird and frustrating.” 3.11
Creating a coworking space was his way of bringing the right people
around him, building his own network of available resources.
Because of the nature of the space and its selling points, this is not
one organisation but it is a group of many and organising groups the
bigger they get get’s harder. and it can’t be done by command and
control either, because the success of the space relies on the success
of the people and the community within in it and to allow people
to flourish you have to empower them to create that community
themselves.
28
“The key thing is to get the social engagement. Communitybuilding has to happen first; people need to articulate what’s
broke, and then what they want.”
(Dr. Jackson Designing Healthy Communities) 4.26
In creating that community the desired effect is one of
decentralisation, where there is no one person who can leave the
space and destroy the community much like a city according to Steve
Johnson 2.6
“The power of a city is their decentralisation from function.
There’s no one place you could destroy to make it fail. The system
still thrives after 9/11.” The web as a city – Steve Johnson 2.6
In-fact the coworking movement use this decentralisation in their
group “logo” they use the starfish and the spider metaphor, inspired
by the book The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A.
Beckstrom, which “explores the phenomenal and unstoppable new
power of the starfish organisations and will change the way you look
at the world.”
The metaphor:
“Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature
on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. But
cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not
only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body.
Starfish can achieve this feat because, unlike spiders, they are
decentralised; every major organ is replicated across each arm.”
1.6
The coworking movement itself is decentralised but the spaces
themselves should strive for the same ideals - Empower people
to build their own community, everyone in your space should be
an instigator of something, of starting random conversations, of
being the one who sends funny links on you tube of being the party
starter, the cake bringer, the luncheon organiser the lecture giver the
networker there are many roles to play and a space is full of people
with many talents for instigating community. The benefit of our
current state is that we don’t have to be all doing the same thing,
every coworking space has a different mix of vocations.
“For too long we have had doctors talking only to doctors,
and urban planners, architects, and builders talking only to
29
themselves. The point is that all of us, including those in public
health, have got to get out of the silos we have created, and we
have got to connect—actually talk to each other before and
while we do our work—because there is no other way we can
create the environment we want.” 4.27 How “Small Change”
Leads to Big Change: Social Capital and Healthy Places
A successful space doesn’t actually require a lot of staff, and a big
budget, Indy Hall with 2 floors of a building in Philadelphia only
have 2 staff to keep Indy Hall going because they have a culture of self
leadership
“I haven’t actually run my space in close to 4 years now, and
we’re a little over 5 years old. About one and a half years into
us running a space I brought on help for the first time and have
been working really hard to make sure that Indy Hall does
Beautiful things without me. So that’s a combination of whoever
is working here as well as our members and for the first time
we’ve actually hired a second person, so there is now a team. But
we run a pretty light operation and still manage to do a whole
lot.” Alex Hillman Interview 3.11
1871 In Chicago have a 7 staff to 500 visitors daily,
“There’s 7 of us and 500 people here everyday, so its a lot to
manage and a lot to handle. But because our staff is so small I
think a lot of the members take it on themselves to be a starter,
to create a group for developers or a luncheon for women.”
Caity Moran 1871 3.4
A successful community in a coworking space will be one that self
organises, where the members are empowered to act in the groups
interests - One where the group takes charge of it’s own culture and
where it wants to go, defining their own subtle rules of play. The
larger the group gets, the more important it will be that they can self
organise, that they feel empowered to create their own gatherings
and events and that they feel it’s their responsibility to make the
connections needed to sustain the community.
“Who decides that SoHo should have this personality and
that the Latin Quarter should have this personality? There are
some kind of executive decisions, but mostly the answer is —
everybody and nobody.” 2.6 Steve johnson* The web as a city
30
“It’s kind of like when you were in high school and you were
part of a team; you know you’re part of that soccer team or that
football team and you’re wearing your letters with pride,” Johnny
enthuses.” 1.2 Working in the Unnoffice
TAKE AWAYS
Community is the key to the new workplace, culture is king - A
shared goal and identity, where the individual CAN be an individual
is what separates the new from the old workplace. Everyone can be an
instigator.
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CHAPTER 5 - COWORKING
Coworking:
Where did it all
come from.
I explored at the beginning of my research some of the background
that has lead to the movement around coworking. Here I look at
the key developments in the short history of coworking. Examining
some of the past and current circumstances which have lead to
impressive growth over the past 7 years. In the past 5 years New
York City has gone from having one coworking space to having 80.
4.28
Coworking has a fairly short history and it’s difficult to pin down as
Alex Hillman told me when we chatted, there is the more commonly
cited story in America and many variations worldwide due to similar
circumstances concluding in a natural evolution to coworking.
Speaking of Citizen Space identifying heavily with open source, Alex
told me:
“They created Wikis and discussion groups to get the word out
and this, I believe, is a large portion of the DNA of why it has
turned into what is is today, it is spreading like wildfire and
the people that do it are more likely to share than to contain
knowledge in any one silo. Meanwhile, simultaneously to that
entire story going on, similar stories where unfolding in other
parts of the world. There’s a European lineage, an Asian lineage
and they sound very similar with different characters” Alex
Hillman Interview 3.11
Because of the difficulty in establishing a true history of coworking
as an activity I have drawn up a timeline of what has been interesting
and stood out as important landmarks during my own research.
32
FIG 9 – Timeline
It all depends who you speak to where the origins of coworking
come from. If your looking for the current iteration most popular in
America, now growing the world over, the version of the story goes a
little this:
Brad Neuberg from San Francisco, was a coder, used to hacking out
solutions, in 2005 he decided to create a community of likeminded
people to work alongside in order to keep what he loved about
freelance and what he loved about structure and community. He used
the word coworking to describe what his space was for and was the
first to do so.
Based out of Spiral Muse simply referred to as the coworking
group. The space was inside a house, with a kitchen communal area
and work space. The original online flyer said “Coworking Rents
Space From Spiral Muse, a Healing Centre Complete with Massage
Therapists, Life Coaches, and More On the Second Floor” 4.29
The space utilised the 3 day downtime of the health and wellness
centre to get them out of their homes and working side by side, but
also maintained the ethos of the health centre with yoga and other
healthy activities being a daily occurrence.
Mr Neuberg and many of the other first coworking space creators
where developers and advocates of the open source movement
they applied the same principals to their new ventures and they
shared their knowledge online on the coworking wiki, spreading the
concept.
After his Spiral Muse venture Brad then created the first full time
coworking space The Hat Factory in San Francisco. Simultaneously
Chris Messina and others where establishing the first BarCamps -
33
The antidote to the corporate over priced overproduced exclusive
tech conferences. From this Chris Messina along with Tara hunt
Founded Citizen Space, one of the longest running coworking spaces
- currently with 3 locations - and Brad, Chris and others involved
early the movement created the coworking wiki and the google group
as any open-source thinkers would.
The concept certainly isn’t a new one, if we think of things like sewing
bees or quilting bees which go back to the 1700s and any tribal
groups from any period we find people gathering to work, to sing
together and to just generally not be alone. In 2002 Daniel H. Pink
was writing about F.A.N. clubs, Free Agent Nation clubs which where
similar to the popular current term of a Jelly event, gatherings of free
agents to learn and get away from home, they would meet in coffee
shops and other designated third spaces.
Of course the crucial development in the growth of coworking is an
outside factor, the instigation of wifi and later 3G. Wifi becoming
more commonly used and available around 2003/4 we have all the
tools necessary to work anywhere we please, and a generation of new
workers who are used to instant contact through mobile and Skype,
working anywhere is even more appealing now than back in 2002
when Daniel H. Pink wrote about Free Agents:
“The largest private employer in the U.S. is not Detroit’s General
Motors or Ford, or even Seattle’s Microsoft or Amazon.com, but
Milwaukee’s Manpower Inc., a temp agency with more than
1,100 offices in the U.S. The dream of America’s young people?
Not to climb through an organization, or even to accept a job at
one, but to create their own gig on their own terms—often on
the World Wide Web.” 1.3 Free Agent Nation - 2002
A factor that can’t be ignored in the short history of coworking is the
fact that we have had a major economic downturn and subsequent
unemployment rates. Coworking sums up a period in time right now
where the stars have aligned for some people to create something
new. Tony Bacigalupo is one of those people, founder of New Work
City, advocate of the coworking movement and a frequent blogger on
the surrounding factors of coworking. He points out,
“The Irony of being able to work anywhere is that there isn’t
anywhere designed for people who can work anywhere, so
a movement formed around that and that is the coworking
34
movement.” - Tony Bacigalupo
Tony’s presentation on the Job Crisis ‘Let’s fix the stupid job crisis
ourselves’ highlights the importance of the kind of independent
workers that use coworking spaces and that there is an opportunity
to create jobs for ourselves and for each other. Creating value for
yourself becomes a positive action in tackling the job crisis.
“The decline in lifetime job security has shifted the balance
towards self-employment”. 1.2 Working in the Unoffice
If we look at Google Trends we can see that in 2007, around the same
time as the downturn in the economy began to have major effect, the
word coworking began to take off in search. Google Trends are by
their own admission not a basis for accurate data but they can give
us a good picture in these circumstances of the growth in the use of
Brad Neuberg’s term ‘coworking’ we can see that 2 years after Brad
started using the phrase there has been fairly steady growth since,
with ‘coworking space’ being the most popular related term.
FIG 10 – Google trends
During this growth of coworking between 2007 and 2012 many
entrepreneurial coworkers and others, in the open-source thinking
spirit, have seen the need to create new online platforms and
directories for others to find coworking spaces and much like
coworking itself many appeared at the same time seemingly all
seeking to find the solution to the same problem. The two most
prominent of which are Deskwanted a directory of coworking spaces
available in cities around the world, successful because of it’s blog
DeskMag which conducts the annual Global Coworking Survey
and has established itself outside of the Google group and Wiki to
be the place for study and research on coworking best practice and
trends. The other being Loosecubes, established in 2010 it was the
35
most publicised of the directories by tech blogs and newspapers alike.
Loosecubes was somewhat responsible for a lot of press around the
coworking movement, lauded as the Airbnb of deskspace, they where
venture capital funded in 2011, but they struggled with their business
model and failed to create the platform for coworking that was
envisioned by the community and the press they closed the website in
November 2012.
Other entrepreneurs are creating software to help coworking spaces
with the day to day running of the space. As time has gone on some
better established business models for spaces have become apparent
and it’s now possible to make something that can be useful and
adaptable to every space. Cobot where one of the firt to create such
software and more recently established Desktime have created a
balance between Directory and software.
Other entrepreneurs are creating ventures with a more community
focus, Goodcoworking.com launched at the end of 2012 aims to
create a different type of directory one based around ‘social’, the
spaces are listed when someone tells their story in a tweet of what
they love about working in that coworking space. Coffee and power
now called Work club connects you to people with skills in your
area who are working in different spaces, Work club bridges the gap
between home, coworking spaces and coffee shops, preventing the
small communities from becoming too inward facing, creating a
larger pool of resources in your area.
Parallel to the coworking movement we have seen websites like
Airbnb, Craigslist and Ebay show us that collaborative consumption
is the smart way forward.
“Sharing is to Ownership what the iPod is to the eight track,
what the solar panel is to the coal mine. Sharing is clean, crisp,
urbane, postmodern, owning is dull, selfish, timid, backward.”
New York Times Journalist Mark Levine via WMIY. 1.1
Ventures like Deskwanted, ShareDesks, Cobot and Desktime
look to the success of Airbnb to establish the economy of trust
Ratchel Botsman talks about in her recent TED Talk 2.5, The more
acclimatised to the process of sharing we become the more likely the
success of the directories and therefore the coworking spaces will
become.
36
TAKE AWAYS
The history of coworking is short but the concept has proven itself in
the past. An emergence of new tools and supporting infrastructure
around the movement could lead to further growth in the near
future.
37
CHAPTER 6 - ECONOMIC EFFECT
Sharing is caring:
An economy of trust
and other things.
Some people have heralded coworking as part of the solution to
fix our broken economy, to understand why we need answer a
few questions: How does coworking fit into the bigger picture of
economic ebb and flow? What economic effect does it have on the
individuals involved? How can it serve the economic climate in the
future?
Text: Daniel H Pink tells us:
“To truly understand where the economy is heading, you need to
get to know free agents — who they are, what they do, how they
work, and why they’ve made this choice.” 1.3 Free Agent Nation
This was 2002 how much of this still applies and why, how much does
coworking play a part in this?
This rise of coworking and collectives and other new work spaces
all come under the bigger banner and current trend of collaborative
consumption - why buy my own in the current climate when I can
share with others a resource we all need and can effectively share
with the new ease of access. But this trend doesn’t look like it’s just for
the current economic climate, we are changing our habits and going
back to some basic values that had gotten lost a little in our dense
urban areas, where distrust didn’t allow us to share and a history of
commercial propaganda encouraged us to own.
When I talk about neighbourhoods in chapter 5 I talk about the
problem of disassociation and distrust in urban areas, that people
need to be empowered to take action within their community. Trust
needs to be reinstated locally in the way it is being established in our
online world with our online communities. In her recent TED Talk
38
Rachel Botsman states that the currency of the new economy will be
trust that our:
“Reputation is becoming a currency that will be more powerful
than our credit history in the 21st century” **2.5**
A big statement from Rachel but it’s not hard to see this becoming
a reality when we look at the success of airbnb, TaskRabbit, Uber,
Zipcar and other peer to peer services.
At the MIT Centre for Big data conference quoting Airbnb CEO
Brian Chesky, Mike Olson told the crowd that, by the end of this year
(December 31st), the company will be filling more room nights than
Hilton Hotels. This is a huge milestone in the trend, Airbnb is the
catalyst that will help more and more people change their behaviours.
“But not only is Collaborative Consumption driven by consumer
motivations that extend far deeper than cost savings, the habits
started to stick and spread before the financial collapse of 2008.
Economic necessity has just made people more open to new ways
of accessing what they need” 1.1
These platforms, Airbnb, etsy, Taskrabbit and Zipcar, are enabling
what is known as micro-entrepreneurship - monetising your
personal resources and creating new financial opportunities on a
individual scale. And this in turn has other effects on local and global
economics,
“Airbnb guests contributed $56 million USD in economic
activity to San Francisco between June 2011 and May 2012”
4.30
We do though need to be careful when looking at this trend of
collaborative consumption and the economy of trust that Rachel
Botsman talks about as some things are currently the privilege of
the middle classes and those who have ready access to the internet
that they can make the best use of these services. Also it remains
to be seen that similar patterns would work in other industries.
Interestingly the people who could sometimes benefit the most from
the ethos of the sharing economy have the least ability to access the
services, to get online to find free furniture on Freecycle, to have a car
to pick up the furniture, to access information on clothes swaps and
home help from Taskrabit (useful for the elderly).
39
But for coworking these things only acclimatise us to the notion of
sharing, and reputation based services, It’s an easier leap of faith to
consider sharing your office with a stranger on Desktime than it is to
share your home on Airbnb.
Currently the recorded 2000 plus coworking spaces worldwide
are not nearly enough to accommodate the Current and predicted
Mobile Worker Population, According to the IDC (Information Data
Corporation) the mobile worker population is to reach 1.3 Billion by
2015. 4.7
“After all, even if there were 11,000 U.S. coworking spaces roughly the number of U.S. Starbucks - with 50 members, they
would only be serving 550,000 workers. This is less than 1/2
of 1% of the U.S. workforce and less than 4% of the number of
independent workers.” 4.31
In 2012 Independents Contributed About $1,000,000,000,000 to the
U.S. Economy 4.7
This is where Big Coworking and Coworking Franchises must be
considered. Betahaus in Berlin offers several floors of coworking
space, event space, workshops and a cafe. 1871 in Chicago
boasts 50,000 square feet of coworking spaces accommodating
entrepreneurs and startups in the Chicago area. Bigger yet Club
Office in Germany has 9 stories, 80,000 square feet of space. Other
longer established coworking spaces are growing their space to
accommodate for demand, WeWork in New York, Indy Hall in
Philadelphia. These larger spaces benefit from the economy of scale,
they become more efficient and can begin to create profit whereas
smaller spaces often only break even.
1871 in Chicago is a not for profit but it’s purpose is to support the
tech industry by providing space, advice, education to local startups.
At only 6 months old 1871 is still very much experimental and hasn’t
proven itself yet but the prospects of the effect of such a space on
local growth in the industry are high. One thing that points to the
future success of coworking is that spaces like 1871 create positive
press around the industry, and encourage governmental initiatives
and other economic development agencies to see coworking as a valid
contribution to creating sustainable growth. The running of these
spaces is also extremely sustainable, a space accommodating over 100
members can be run by 1-2 individuals, 1871 deal with 500 people
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through the space everyday with team of only 7 running it.
These Big Coworking spaces are more than just coworking they are a
hybrid of Incubator, Coworking Space, ‘Coffee shop +’ and BarCamp.
They offer much more value to the community around the space by
connecting with local government and initiatives, by being less niche.
The bigger these spaces get though the more difficulty they have
dealing with the important aspect of community (See chapter 4)
TAKE AWAYS
Coworking can be the facilitators of these new economic patterns
such as sharing, tech communities, micro-entrepreneurship. Work on
your own and trust in others!
41
CHAPTER 7 - WHAT’S NEXT
Outward not inward:
Communes for the
digital age.
What does the future hold for the working environment? In this
chapter I will explore the future and some suggestions as to what
could lie ahead based on my research and observations. Excuse
this chapter for being overly grandiose and utopian. Looking at
coworking’s history is a little too short to reveal the pattern of what
might come next but looking instead at the history of the workplace
and also our employment can tell us that it is always evolving and
that we have reached the tipping point of the current standard set
up and people are now exploring new options – it’s time for new
workspaces.
The idea of sharing and of collaborative consumption makes sense
to people again, after years of consumerism we are possibly and
hopefully on the brink of another evolution in our behaviours –
sharing in the digital landscape.
“In the UK, there are more than 100,000 people on the waiting
list for an allotment (a plot of land that can be rented by an
individual for growing fruits and vegetables) and in some parts
of London the wait is up to forty years.” 1.1 What’s Mine Is Yours
There is a hunger there for a better way of life (a ‘good life’ you might
say) but like I said the current situation is that it is a little bit the
privilege of the middle class and before it can move forward it needs
to cross more borders and become a viable option to more people
to become a success. This is where I think content will come in to
play. My final question to my interviewees was “what’s next for your
space?” and almost everyone specified providing content in some
form. From just wanting to have more speakers lecture in their space,
to provide classes (Grinders have skillshare classes http://grindspaces.
42
com/blog/) to the more advanced undertakings like 1871’s notion
to provide content both offline and online, paid for and free for the
public.
If the “global economy is in transition to a ‘knowledge economy’” 4.5
then how will coworking fit into this? Well if our main protagonists
are Knowledge workers then it stands to reason that they will seek
to educate themselves and with this many spaces have sidelines in
lectures and providing content along with ING and NextDoor and
many many others. Sharing knowledge and resources is a motivator
for many coworkers, it creates value in the community.
Education will play a big part in the future of spaces and educational
institutions will blend between online (skillshare) and offline but
amongst communities large and small. With traditional education
lagging in some parts and flourishing in others like MIT online
lecture series, Code academy, Starter league, General assembly,
education is becoming more equal in it’s accessibility, the best
education in any subject can be gained over the internet already and
that part is only going to get better.
“Teaching must be a shared assignment” 4.32 willworkfor.org
It’s not yet here on a grad enough scale but we are definitely edging
towards Daniel’s vision in Free Agent Nation, in 2002,
“Lego careers. Instead of climbing a prefabricated ladder, rung
by rung, in a predetermined order, careers will have much
greater variety. People will assemble and reassemble them much
as kids play with Legos. The pieces will be contacts, skills, desires,
and available opportunity—and people will build impermanent
structures with infinite, idiosyncratic variations.” 1.3 Free Agent
Nation
Cospace is one of the number of online directories available for
finding coworking spaces, younger than some of the others, Cospace’s
aims merge searching for collaborative spaces with education and
talent acquisition. The test for them though will be whether they can
reach critical mass to run an effective service.
“We all fundamentally agree education, particularly continuous
education or lifelong learning, is the key to innovation and the
vitality of our communities.” 3.33 Cospace Website
43
Think about the neighbourhood research from chapter 005 what
we saw there was that neighbourliness was about allowing people
to interact again and creating tools to allow people to share and
contribute in their own ways creating value through community and
through shared resource and skills this has been taken further by
the Internet shoe superstore Zappos with their ‘Downtown Project’.
Zappos core values centre around the best customer service, their
company is built on the goal “Regardless of our structure, our goal is
to position Zappos as the online service leader”
http://downtownproject.com/ The downtown project Las Vegas
- mega coworking spot. A $350 million dollar investment in
Downtown Las Vegas Fremont East, It will be the large Internet
superstore Zappos new headquarters but with marked differences
from other large corporate headquarters, Investing that money in
Small Businesses, Tech Startups, Education, Arts & Culture and
Residential and real estate. The goals of the community* are to
create the most community focused large city in the world and the
coworking capital of the world. Accelerating serendipity - creating
new third places trying to build them into urban areas to create a
better balance and avoid the city being the places where only people
work and not live. The ideal is that ‘The small businesses should
contribute to the community in some way’. 4.34
And where are these new centres likely to be, we can predict Tel Aviv,
(Second top of the Start up genome’s study FIG 10) where Google
have opened their second ‘Campus’ or any other Start-up Ecosystem.
“Unsurprisingly, atop the rankings sits Silicon Valley, which
remains the mecca of entrepreneurship and was used as a
baseline from which to compare the rest of the list. Coming in
second is Tel Aviv, followed by Los Angeles, Seattle, New York
City and Boston, before crossing the Atlantic to London —
which ranked as the largest ecosystem in Europe. While five of
the top startup ecosystems in the world are in the U.S., the rest of
the world is catching up.” Techcruch.com 4.23
44
FIG 11 - Start up ecosystems chart from The Startup Genome
Coworking spaces and in-fact all of these distributed groups and
networks we have right now from everything between online
forums and spaces like betahaus berlin are like communes for the
digital age the difference between these communes and the ones of
the 1840s until the 80s is that they are outward facing rather than
inward facing a commune meant that people would share common
interests, resources and labour and barter and trade with no need
for a currency other than reputation, there is very little hierarchy in
the traditional commune but none of this ever stretched beyond the
borders of their own group, it was very difficult to agree on many
rules without hierarchy and difficult to keep that reputation within
large numbers, they where particularly selfish out with their own
community. Now what we see with our current communities that
have evolved online and through digital means is an outward facing
proposition the individual creates a community for the good of the
wider community the small commune befits everyone like coworking
space ‘Downtown Project’ and NextDoor Chicago, can all be part
of more than one commune. even more so when it comes to online
communities like Craigstlist, ebay, Facebook or Spotify.
The Federation of intentional communities. Which can be ecovillages,
Farm cooperatives, communes, urban housing cooperatives, student
coops, co-housing communities states this on their homepage:
“projects where people strive together with a common vision”
sound quite familiar?, well that’s because it’s what coworking is
about. Within our lifetime 75% of all people will live in cities. These
people with have need for new kinds of third spaces. More of these
spaces like Zappos the Downtown project replacing the long gone
community centres and village squares of the past to create new third
places where coworking is one part of a whole environment, focussed
45
around the local community needs. If government doesn’t catch on
then big businesses will look to follow Zappos’ lead.
TAKE AWAYS
The movement is thoroughly underway there’s no denying it and no
going back either, so the important thing will be what will make it
better, what will keep it firmly at it’s roots of community because if it
doesn’t then of course there is always the risk that it becomes another
place we don’t wish to spend our time, just another form of the office
for a new time.
46
CHAPTER 8 - ON CONCLUSIONS
The space maker
And the educator
There are a not many papers specifically on coworking, there is
however a lot of thinking online around the subject, I hope that
what this paper does is bring some of that disparate thinking
together into one document for aspiring space makers to use as a
resource and inspiration.
My report at the beginning aimed to answer some initial research
questions, What are the key components of a successful work space?
Who uses and what are the benefits of using coworking spaces? What
will happen next to the spaces we work in? Though my final research
covered more broad topics as it came to light that new work spaces
could be part of a bigger picture.
The coworking term and thinking should not just be confined to
coworking spaces, it’s a new way of thinking about any workplace
– people, daily, making the deliberate choice to not work alone.
Therefore the findings in this paper could be used to improve any
workspace.
WHAT ARE THE KEY COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL WORK SPACE?
Firstly community, building your community to act both
independently and together is important no matter the size of
your space a decentralised community can have a larger impact
on the surrounding community casting a wider net benefiting the
surrounding area. In a space the affordances or Proximity, Privacy
and Permission can’t be overlooked, the difference between a
planned space and an unplanned space is growth, successful spaces
that exist are in high demand. Creating your community and space
should revolve around a Human Centred design approach, your
membership’s involvement no matter how large is essential to moving
beyond sharing to collaboration and collective action. These spaces
can be more than just where people work but replacements for our
47
long forgotten community centres and town squares if we create
strong communities.
WHO USES AND WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF USING COWORKING SPACES?
If predictions that the number of coworking spaces will double in
size by october 2013 then the people who use coworking spaces will
be an even bigger array. Right now Knowledge workers are the main
protagonists, independent workers, startups and smart businesses
who are placing workers within coworking spaces looking for direct
access to inspiration, community and talent.
The benefits of using a coworking space are social and educational.
We are around others and we learn from others, just by being around
people working and creating things people inspire each other to go
further, do what they love and develop their careers with life long
learning, with what feels like less effort than it would take to do so
from home or within an office setting where everyone is in a bubble
of similar content.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT TO THE SPACES WE WORK IN?
Coworking can be the facilitators of new economic patterns primarily
the knowledge economy and rise of the independent worker. We will
see more content from coworking spaces, a merging of educational
tools and services with coworking projects. Sharing is caring and the
first rung on the ladder of community action and positive impact.
Coworking will need to stay true to it’s roots, the continuation of
Open Source thinking around coworking is imperative to it’s success
and staying true to their logo of the starfish – decentralised – for both
the concept and their local communities.
48
AND FINALLY...
“What is finished... is the idea that this great country is
dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual
in it. It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary
human being that’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there
that’s finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent
individuals. It’s a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized,
deodorized, whiter-that-white, steel-belted bodies, totally
unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston
rods... Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such
a bad word. Because good or bad, that’s what is so. The whole
world is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human
but aren’t. The whole world not just us. We’re just the most
advanced country, so we’re getting there first. The whole world’s
people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered,
insensate things... “
‘Howard Beale’ – In the movie The Network -1976
If this was 1976 then 2013 onward is when we revolt against the
humanoid.
THANKS TO...
Sam Rosen and everyone at Desktime and The Coop, Chicago. All my
Interviewees. My family and to Jesper Bröring for their support.
49
APPENDIX 1 - SOURCES
Sources
As this was an academic paper it is a requirement to list the
sources of relevant information. If you are looking for more info
on coworking and the Case Studies please check out the Resources
section.
1 BOOKS
1.1. What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption Rachel Botsman (Author), Roo Rogers (Author)
1.2. Working in the UnOffice: A Guide to Coworking for Indie
Workers, Small Businesses, and Nonprofits - Genevieve V DeGuzman
(Author), Andrew I Tang (Contributor)
1.3. Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workforce
Are Transforming The Way We Live - Daniel H. Pink (Author)
1.4. Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is
Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us - Andrew Keen (Author)
1.5. Here comes everybody - Clay Shirky
1.6. The Starfish and the Spider” the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless
Organisations - Ori Brafman (Author)
OTHER
2.1. Slideshare - Let’s Fix The Stupid Job Crisis by Tony
Bacigalupo of New Work City - (link: http://slidesha.re/XkhjZY)
2.2. Deskmag Coworking Surveys 2011, 2012 (link: http://bit.ly/UK7rrJ)
2.3. The MBO partners state of independent workforce index (link: http://bit.ly/XNiDbU)
50
2.4. Small business labs - Coworking research - (link: http://bit.ly/
WNXgky)
2 VIDEOS
2.5. The Currency Of The New Economy Is Trust by Ratchel Botsman
TEDGLOBAL2012 - (link: http://bit.ly/ZrlVwP)
2.6. The Web as a City by Steve Johnson TED2003 (link: http://bit.ly/VPnfJe)
2.7. People In Beta by KS2 (link: http://vimeo.com/21837974)
2.8. Coworking stories Vimeo group (link: http://bit.ly/U4vq52)
3 OWN INTERVIEWS / CASE STUDIES
3.1. GOOGLE CAMPUS - LONDON
3.2. CAMP - OMAHA
3.3. ONWARD - CHICAGO
3.4. 1871 - CHCAGO
3.5. ENERSPACE - CHICAGO
3.6. INDY HALL - PHILADELPHIA 3.7. NEXT DOOR - CHICAGO
3.8. ATOMIX COFFEE SHOP - CHICAGO
3.9. COWORK BUFFALO - BUFFALO
3.10. THE COOP - CHICAGO
3.11. ALEX HILLMAN - INDY HALL - PHILADELPHIA
51
4 ONLINE LINKS
4.1. Google Think Quarterly - (link: http://bit.ly/UAnwPd)
4.2. GOOD - More people are staying at school (link: http://bit.ly/Wsvfyf)
4.3. Harvard Business Review - Who moved my cube? (link: http://bit.ly/Wqr6Lq)
4.4. Information Society - (link: http://bit.ly/WpyJ4p)
4.5. Knowledge Economy - (link: http://bit.ly/ZywX8o)
4.6. Digital Natives - (link: http://bit.ly/13bWTqi)
4.7. IDC Report on Mobile Workers - (link: http://bit.ly/UwnY0Y)
4.8. Results of Deskmag 3rd Survey (link: http://slidesha.re/Uwp90n)
4.9. Coworking google group - (link: http://bit.ly/ZhQgOo)
4.10. Coworking Wiki - (link: http://bit.ly/TH4Pfl)
4.11. BBH Labs - (link: http://bit.ly/WF4irJ)
4.12. Google X Labs - (link: http://bit.ly/UE18pR)
4.13. Norstrom Innovation Labs - (link: http://bit.ly/13epJp7)
4.14. New York Times Labs - (link: http://bit.ly/ZySu0x)
4.15. Harvard Innovation Lab - (link: http://hvrd.me/RCGbgj)
4.16. MIT CoLab - (link: http://bit.ly/WpW5a0)
4.17. Media Innovation Lab - (link: http://bit.ly/VGALRC)
4.18. Stanford Peace Innovation Labs - (link: http://stanford.io/
TYlGt5)
4.19. ING Cafes - (link: http://bit.ly/URZ26w)
52
4.20. Gigaom - 5 reasons to support employee coworking (link: http://bit.ly/U0ci8l)
4.21. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs - (link: http://bit.ly/VQggin)
4.22. Familiar strangers - (link: http://bit.ly/13dWK5L)
4.23. Startup ecosystem chart - The startup genome - (link: http://bit.
ly/10cQXyv)
4.24. Knowledge worker - (link: http://bit.ly/VKqa8w)
4.25. General Assembly - (link: http://bit.ly/Wy6CjI)
4.26. Designing Healthy Communities - (link: http://bit.ly/Sk0P6r)
4.27. Project for public spaces - How small change leads to big change
- (link: http://bit.ly/VeXaGh)
4.28. Mapping New York City’s coworking centres - (link: http://wny.
cc/VOYuN4)
4.29. Spiral Muse original Flyer - (link: http://codinginparadise.org/
coworking/)
4.30. Airbnb helps tourism more than hotels - (link: http://bit.ly/
RFOTu4)
4.31. Small business labs - The Rise of big coworking - (link: http://
bit.ly/10eLo2N)
4.32. Will work for - (link: willworkfor.org)
4.33. Cospace - (link: http://bit.ly/XMNsxj)
4.34. The Downtown Project - (link: http://bit.ly/RFQvUL)
PAPERS
5.1. - Working Alone Together: Coworking as Emergent
Collaborative Activity
(link: http://jbt.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1050651912444070)
53
5.2 - The Coffee Shop: Social and Physical Factors Influencing Place
Attachment - Lisa Waxman, Ph.D., Florida State University - 2006
5.3 - An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table
arrangements and background noise - E Laurier, A Whyte, K Buckner
- Journal of Mundane Behaviour, 2001
54
APPENDIX 2 - RESOURCES
Resources
55