These people thrive on challenges and draw energy from environments that allow them to learn. The early cohorts of digital natives are now graduating from schools where personalised learning has been integrated into the curriculum. They expect to be an active participant, not a passive observer.

The transformation in our schools is being played out in our workplaces. Technology is shifting both the means of work and the relationships that manage it. Knowledge-based processes are increasingly automated or outsourced. Hierarchies are being routed by networks.

According to a 2013 paper by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, two Oxford University researchers, 47% of all jobs are likely to be replaced by a computer – not just factory work, but any process governed by an algorithm of rules where best practices can be identified.

What’s left for us humans is arguably the more interesting stuff that relies on higher-order thinking, collaboration, innovation and relationships. These are the qualities that people bring that robots aren’t so good at – interactivity, emotional intelligence, flexibility, quirkiness.

They’re all qualities found in the growing companies that we most admire.

In Australia, the poster child for such progressive, human-led but technology-enabled companies is software development company Atlassian – a company that is on the verge of an IPO that would see the two 34-year-old co-CEOs valued at over A$1b each. The success of this company is founded on a set of values targeted squarely at the new world of work:

1. Open Company, No Bullshit
2. Build with Heart and Balance
3. Don’t #@!% the Customer
4. Play, as a Team
5. Be the Change you Seek

Both Deloitte’s passionate people and many prospective Atlassian staffers “may struggle with clearly defined roles, organisational silos, and predictability”. Seely Brown and Hagel argue that organisations need to redesign their work environments – both physical and virtual environments – and management systems to attract and retain passionate people.

The changes in the physical workplace are well underway. Andrew Laing’s 2013 paper on the ITC sector in New York sets out a comprehensive survey of the shifts both in demand and supply for workspace. The conventions of the relentlessly efficient single-use office tower, the long commercial lease, the privately owned work point are all crumbling. Many of our clients are already using less space and looking for new ways to share the space they have. Work is leaving the building, and looking for new toeholds across the city – the new hubs and third places, and the old libraries, cafes and public spaces.

The spaces in between will be the real attractor for the Googles, the Atlassians and the Kulgans. Curating these spaces will be the next challenge for precinct planners and city strategists who have long understood the place-making contributions of landscape and art. The next generation of installations will be playful hybrids of virtual and physical worlds – not just for the tech sector, but for every human with a super computer in her or his pocket. Urban gaming will be serious play.

Play offers the freedom to invent, to improvise and experiment. To do things that would look like failure in other contexts. Over the past five years a whole new ecology of games has emerged with the saturation of the smart phone and GPS technologies.

“Gaming is play across media, time, social spaces, and networks of meaning. It requires players to be fluent in a series of connected literacies that are multi-modal, performative, productive, and participatory in nature.” pvi collective

Serious urban games now exist for training for change, for health and for social cohesion. They range from covert individual experiences through to gleeful group quests. Here are four examples of the rapidly growing field.

1. Soulfill

Soulfill is a mobile assisted role-playing game for public transport. It wants you to focus on the people in the environment around you, not on the screen in your hand. The game prompts are minimal. You listen to a narrator who challenges you to move past the awkwardness of initiating eye contact. You score points by initiating and maintaining eye contact with strangers – and you lose points by making eye contact with those already looking at you.

Multi-player games are more carefully programmed in time and space – and this orchestration accounts for the influence of performance arts groups in urban gaming.

2. Deviator

Perth-based pvi collective’s game known as Deviator recently took over the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. Deviator is an immersive, outdoor game played in teams with smart phones. Audience members are charged with the mission of temporarily transforming their city into a playground by engaging with a number of not-so-serious challenges.

I’m still not sure how pole dancing in Oxford Street qualified, but the gleeful fun of sack races on cross walks, “kiss chasey” in Taylor Square, and blowing up balloons until they burst resonated – most of them were straight out of the school yard. Other locations asked for more subversive play – (follow someone without their knowledge until they turn into a doorway) – or regenerative (here are some seeds you might want to plant) or declarative (what message would you like to leave on this blackboard). But the need to rack up as many points inside an hour made for an hilarious frenzied night of fun. Watch here.

3. Black market

The group behind deviator has another project in development titled black market. Part game, part social experiment, black market takes place on city streets and locates the players inside a world of economic collapse. Inspired by the core philosophies of the ‘occupy’ movement and the financial bankruptcies in Europe, players need to survive in a world where money and material wealth have collapsed. Bartering and bargaining come to the fore.

4. Massively Multiplayer soba

Massively Multiplayer Soba is a large scale collaborative urban game focused on culture, food and language that culminates in a meal. Points are awarded on the basis of complexity and the depth of interactions, rather than a scavenger hunt. The game is designed to encourage people to mix and interact with residents in meaningful ways that challenge preconceptions of race and language.

Where to next? The next generation of urban gaming might see more pervasive games that leave traces of activity in spaces for future visitors. Or games that create more open-ended stories. Even games that connect people more intensely over time. The one thing we can be sure about is that the growth will be extraordinary, and with the mobile phone at the centre.

“The phone takes the processing power of yesterday’s supercomputers – even the most basic model has access to more number-crunching capacity than NASA had when it put men on the moon in 1969 – and applies it to ordinary human interactions”.

Ordinary human interactions are the stuff of our cities. Watch out for the rise of serious play.

Sue Wittenoom (sue.wittenoom@archtam.com) is a director of ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Australia. She’s presenting at GreenCities 2015 in Melbourne on March 18. Follow her on twitter @swittenoom

More urban gaming links:

https://www.ingress.com/: a mobile, geolocation-based game that calls on players to travel to real-world locations such as landmarks and public art, where they use their phones to open and close portals that can help or hinder an invading alien race

http://www.rottenapple.us/: random hacks of citizenry

http://www.watershed.co.uk/playablecity/conference14/: A Playable City is a city where people, hospitality and openness are key, enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its services, places and stories.

References:

The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. Hector Rodrigeuz the international journal of computer game research volume 6 issue 1 December 2006

The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2014

The Implications of a Networked Urban Landscape for Architectural Programming. Andrew Laing Volume Art & Science of Real Estate Volume 42 2014 #4

Work and workplaces and the digital city, Andrew Laing, Columbia University Centre for Urban Real Estate, 2013

Propositions for Sydney. Andrew Laing and Sue Wittenoom, 2014

The Power of Immersive Media Frank Rose, strategy+business February 9, 2015

The Play Report. Protein Journal Issue 13

Serious Urban Games. From play in the city to play for the city Gabriele Ferri and Patrick Coppock, February 2012

The future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, 2013

Unlocking the passion of the Explorer. Report 1 of the 2013 Shift Index series. Deloitte Center for the Edge

The truly personal computer The Economist February 28^th 2015

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The conference explored Next Generation Activity Based Workplaces (ABW). I shared an extended case study of SBS’ Agile pilot space in its Artarmon headquarters.

With a background as Australia’s multicultural broadcaster, SBS has a special charter to provide multilingual, multicultural and Indigenous radio, television and digital media services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians, reflecting Australia’s diverse society.

ArchTam has been helping SBS to rethink its workspace to seize the opportunities of media convergence – staff need to be able to work flexibly across content areas and drive multiple platform delivery.

Our SBS client, Manager of Corporate Services Martin Wright, has been leading SBS’ vision of a more innovative and efficient working environment through a period of high-profile budget scrutiny from the Federal Government.

In November, an Australian Federal Government report on possible expenditure cuts at Australia’s two public broadcasters flagged the concept of “variabilising” fixed property costs, suggesting moves by employers to more flexible work practices – and a portfolio of space options that encourage more collaborative consumption of space – might become even more of a priority.

Flexible work practices should be taken up more broadly in the public sector in Australia, where we lag well behind the UK civil service and the US General Services Administration. It was good to see representatives from the Department of Finance and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet paying close attention at the ABW Conference.

SBS’ Agile pilot is an island of raw, experimental energy in its Artarmon building. It looks, feels and sounds like a creative community. All work points are shared, and a wide range of options beyond the desk give staff plenty of choice of where to focus or collaborate.

New laptops, headsets and the wireless presentation screens were all part of the IT upgrade to enable mobility. It’s just celebrated its first year in action, and ArchTam’s Strategy Plus team has completed a post occupancy review of the pilot to understand how it is performing and to build an evidence base that shapes how its workspace develops from here.

The review process included interviews, workshops and onsite observations. It also revisited the previously completed online survey and space utilisation study. The review calibrated the performance of different work settings; while the establishment of sit-stand desks was popular, the ‘grassy knoll’, in contrast, was seen as a design folly that failed to meet comfort basics for viewing content over extended periods. The feedback was clear on what worked, and the evidence we gathered on the ‘workarounds’ confirmed where the change process required more attention.

Images: Design by Hassell, Photos by Nicole England

As we were putting the presentation together, Martin commented that the pilot review process has given him a solid foundation for future development. In much the same way the initial strategic brief for the space framed the design and implementation process, the pilot findings are now setting up the next evolution of the Agile program.

One key change is the need to give work groups the security of a location, but not the ownership of a desk.

SBS wanted to promote collaboration and crosspollination between different work groups in the pilot, so no team neighbourhoods or home zones were put into place throughout it. However, the feedback from participants was that it was more important to be within ear-shot of your primary colleagues than to work alongside people in other teams.

For SBS, the point of the pilot was to take some risks. It needed to trial new settings and new behaviours and, most importantly, set up a feedback and learning loop for the next stage of the public broadcaster’s accommodation story. If you’re not scoring an epic fail in some part of the space or the process, then you’re probably not pushing hard enough beyond the frontier of the organisation’s comfort zone. Pilots let you test these risks before the size of the capex starts to rule them out. And the nature of a building project – long lead times and extended delivery – means that any major new accommodation project needs to position the organisation for where it needs to be, not where it is now.

Sue Wittenoom (sue.wittenoom@archtam.com) is a director of ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Australia. Follow her on twitter @swittenoom

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I was invited to speak at the International Facilities Management Association workplace strategy summit held near Reading, UK in June. This was hosted by Professor Alexi Marmot from University College London and was a followup to a previous summit held at Cornell University in 2012. The attendees were an interesting mix of workplace strategists from around the world (including several previous DEGWers), academics (such as Frank Becker and Wim Pullen), a few architects, as well as a smattering of corporate and government end users. The format was a mix of presentations and panel discussions as well as roundtable exercises. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. The scale was relatively small (around 100 people), which meant that the in-between conversations were often as valuable as the formal discussions.

The big theme seemed to be ‘where is workplace strategy going’? There were several propositions:

• Workplace is becoming consumerized: workplace as a service (WaaS) will replace workplace as designed space. We need to define the requirements for user experience rather than simply enumerate conventional programs of space.
• Workplace is an aspect of Human Resources and as such needs to be considered alongside other organizational rewards, costs, and benefits and in relation to organizational goals for employee behaviors.
• Workplace strategy must consider and ideally measure how the workplace is contributing to health and well-being. Examples would be minimizing the risks of sedentary work styles, and accommodating the different needs of multi-generations.
• Workplace is no longer merely the office but the wider world of co-working and third places. Our methods of briefing and programming need to be re-imagined to take this much more diverse and distributed network of spaces and places into account.
• Workplace strategy is in a sense becoming part of urban strategy: technology has enabled work to happen in less conventional workplace environments, blurring living, working and learning spaces in urban places. We need new approaches for briefing these multi-use and multi-scale environments.
• New responsibilities and managerial concerns arise as workplaces cross the boundaries of private and public spaces and become more like curated experiences or settings for different kinds of events and performances.
• New forms of ownership and procurement of space are emerging in the ‘sharing economy’ that will challenge the old supply chain of developers, landlords, and designers.

Andrew Laing (andrew.laing@archtam.com) leads ArchTam’s global Strategy Plus practice.

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ABC news Australia recently reported that 10 million people in the U.S. are unemployed.  Forty percent of these people have been unemployed for more than six months. Ten million is a huge number to grasp, until you think of it like this: Australia has a population of 23 million people. Imagine every other person being out of work. (In the U.S. it’s every 30th person.)

The story featured Janice, a former government worker, supporting two young children as well as her niece and nephew. Her kids wanted new toys and books, but the little money that was provided from welfare benefits and family support was spent on essentials like rent and food.

Which got me thinking: are shops that are not shops the future in our cities?

My favourite city is Berlin, and in my former neighbourhood, Prenzlauer Berg, there was Leila – a shop that was not a shop – divided into two parts: things that are free and things that you can borrow.

Project  initiator and not-shop-keeper Nikolai Wolfert once gave me a tour of the store. According to Nikolai the average western home has more than 10,000 items of stuff! Nikolai is passionate about sharing, trust, and creating good relationships in our communities. Ultimately he wants to help change our consumer behaviour. He is also a huge fan of Sydney’s Rachel Botsman, the leading advocate in collaborative consumption, whose book I recently borrowed from my friend Bronwyn’s friend Sam.

The free section of the shop is filled with things or stuff that people in the neighbourhood no longer need or don’t really have space for. Books, CDs, DVDs, china, cutlery, trinkets, clothes, shoes, bags, garden seeds and even welly boots adorn homemade shelves. You name it and it’s there! You basically go in and take it, but only if you really need it.

The second section is dedicated to borrowing. Two whole rooms of amazing stuff that you can use free of charge and then give back. People in the community have donated their things for other people to use. It’s the ultimate in creating a resilient community and being good neighbours. You can borrow almost anything: musical instruments, dining room chairs, camping equipment, gardening tools, outdoor furniture, yoga mats, skateboards, children’s toys, kid’s books, cookery books, suitcases, hairdryers, irons and ironing boards, cots, baby change tables, rice cookers, blenders, saucepans, blankets, children’s car seats, bikes, cycle helmets, BBQs, picnic baskets, car tools and DIY books. You can even borrow gardening overalls!

I’ll confess the day I first visited I felt a fraud. After several days trawling around the second hand stores and the flea market without success, I had had to go and buy a clothes airer from a department store. Whilst at first I felt a bit embarrassed and ashamed of my shiny, plastic-wrapped, new purchase, I left the not-shop feeling happy…because I’d agreed to donate my airer to Leila when I left Berlin.

Normalising borrowing is going to be a long journey. When Prince Charles talked of his environmentally friendly lifestyle – recycling old curtains into cushion covers – it was scoffed at by the media as penny pinching.

Most of us have spare rooms, garages, cupboards, and wardrobes full of stuff and junk we neither use nor want. We are addicted to stuff. I’ll be the first to admit that only yesterday another handbag, that I don’t need and I can’t afford, caught my eye! (Note: I didn’t buy it because I’m buying nothing new in 2014!)

But things really are changing. British chain Marks & Spencer offers customers discounts in exchange for unwanted clothes, which are then donated to Oxfam. Last year in Sydney, meanwhile, more than 7,500 sellers took part in the Garage Sale Trail, an event to promote community recycling of unwanted stuff…and yes, most people took part because they wanted to de-clutter their homes.

These stories, and what I’ve seen at Leila, show that sharing, borrowing, lending, making, and mending might just be the future of shopping in our cities in these times of global austerity. I reckon Janice and Mrs. Merkel would agree. What do you think?

Check out the Leila shop at www.leila-berlin.de.

Rachel Smith is an internationally-recognized urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

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