Future Workspaces  - New ways of working in a networked society

 

Where do you think of with the word 'workplace'? What do you envision, a desk in an office? The car of a traveling salesman? Or maybe a drilling rig? What workplace you envision, it is probalbly a pysical one: an environment where people work on a product, are in a meeting, edit docuemnts behind a PC. But these physical workplaces are only a part of the real work environment and ways of working of people. Virtual workplaces become more and more important in information-intense work. But maybe more importantly: in the changing mix between physical and virtual existence completely new possibilities emerge to organise and execute work.

 

Without Internet, e-mail, document servers, digital design systems and digital process control most workplaces would collapse. The virtual part of your workplace will become more and more importantly in the future. The reality is increasingly less a reality of an office, a colleague in a room next to you, but more and more a reality of co-workers scattered around, maybe even in different time zones. The reality is that people have become multi-taskers in different projects, in different teams and that in changing constellations. Collaboration becomes an essential part of knowledge-intense work. Collaboration with colleagues on a certain location, but more and more on different locations often belonging to different organisations and with people who we might not know at all.

 

But how do we design such virtual workspaces? How can we help people to master work and work style change? What work processes, what types of collaboration, communication and interaction need do be supported? And what infrastructure is needed? What does the emergence of virtual workplaces mean anyway to motivation and behaviour of people, groups and organizations? What is the impact on work/private balances, mobility issues? How can we better align the physical and virtual workplace and introduce change?

As an open public/private research initiative, the Future Workpaces program addresses these and related questions on the future of work and helps organisations to prepare and implement strategies to benefit form developments in a maximum way.

 

Op the "Web 2.0" website of Future Workspaces, you can find the Newsradar, with news and events from the project and elsewhere, an overview of practical cases, new concepts for collaboration, and the team blog!