Does Smart-Home Thinking Belong in the Office? | Our Offices ③

Labor-intensive companies trying to reinvent themselves, large multinationals, and a new kind of creativity-led company are all driving this wave of intelligent office design.

Imagine a parking garage that recognizes your car and assigns an elevator to the floor where you parked. The elevator takes you to the floor you need, your phone gets a notification, and your office is ready for you — the lighting and the temperature already set to your preferences.

One company installed lockers to take in employees' deliveries. When a package arrives, the employee gets a text or an email with the locker number and a temporary password. Once the package is picked up, the password resets and the locker goes back on the list of free ones.

Both scenes come from The Future of Work, a recent report from JLL, which offers them as examples of what an intelligent office feels like. People are trying every way they can think of to use advanced technology and networks to build offices that are more convenient and more efficient.

Labor-intensive companies, large multinationals and a new kind of creativity-led company are all driving this wave of intelligent office design.

Banks and other labor-intensive financial firms have been changing fast over the past few years, pushed both by branch closures and by the digital wave. According to a 2016 Citi report on where banking is headed, banks in Europe and the United States are expected to cut 30% of their staff over the decade from 2015 to 2025 — as many as 1.7 million jobs. Which raises a new question: how does a leaner workforce produce more work?

According to data from the research firm Celent, maintaining traditional banks' aging, unruly systems eats up three-quarters of their IT spending, leaving only a quarter for new technology — money they need to hold off a fast-growing threat from tech groups and startups trying to take their market share in payments and other areas.

At large multinationals, teamwork is much harder than it used to be. Not so long ago, team members only had to gather in a conference room to take a run at a problem. Today the people who can solve a given problem are usually scattered across different sites, time zones and countries. Keeping distance from getting in the way of real collaboration — through big video-conferencing systems and other intelligent setups for remote work — has become a hard requirement for multinationals.

At creativity-driven companies, the move toward intelligent offices is mostly about supporting the way ideas get made.

Traditional workspaces are built around efficiency, laid out along a linear workflow. Coming up with ideas works nothing like that. People need to work alone, in twos and threes, and in shifting team formations, discussing and switching constantly between modes until something new comes out of it — which calls for more inventive creative spaces, and the technology to match.

More and more executives are finding that giving employees a job and a place to do it isn't enough. This new generation of young employees leans much harder on digital technology — they grew up with smartphones — so you have to build the kind of space they want, with intelligent, self-service, human-scaled touches that leave employees feeling safe, looked after and supported. That has become a decisive factor in the bond between employees and their company.

We started from office-space cases across different industries, sizes and formats to work out what office design looks like now. Five trends came up again and again, and most office design today falls into one of them:

• Tailoring the office to how a company's teams actually work together, with an emphasis on efficiency;
• Balancing collaborative work against privacy;
• Intelligent offices, which help companies improve the employee experience;
• A focus on physical and mental health, and on sustainability;
• Using design to explain company culture.

This is the third piece. Through three cases, we look at how intelligent offices help companies improve the employee experience. Talking about intelligent offices today no longer means simple things like lighting controls and door-access systems.

Your Office Building Can Know Your Work Habits Better Than Your Family Does

The Edge, finished in early 2015, is the Amsterdam headquarters of the accounting firm Deloitte, designed by the firm OVG.

It knows where you live, what car you drive, who you're meeting today, how much sugar goes in your coffee... Can an office building really look after you like a personal butler? It can. This place, called "the world's most advanced smart office" for the past two years, shows that a smart office is about a lot more than hanging up a few more LED screens.

The building has 40,000 square meters of floor space above ground and was the first office building in the Netherlands built to the BREEAM green-building standard. Seen from the busy A10 motorway, its 15-story glass atrium looks like an enormous shop window displaying the life inside.

That open atrium, 15 stories tall, sits on the north side of the building, giving the interior soft, diffused daylight while avoiding the energy costs of direct sun. Inside the huge glass volume, walkways and elevators running up and down make for a rich set of paths through the building.

The south side uses a load-bearing structure that cuts the window area down, which shades and insulates the building. The atrium also serves the ventilation system, drawing on hot and cold water stored underground for seasonal heating and cooling.

The south façade and the roof are covered with the largest array of solar panels in Europe, to squeeze as much as possible out of the sun.

Inside, the ceiling is made of high-efficiency Philips LED panels carrying 28,000 sensors — a "digital ceiling" that can detect motion, humidity, temperature, light and infrared. Packed that densely, the sensors can tell which spots need cleaning most, so that night's cleaning staff and robots know exactly where to go.

What makes this a "smart building," of course, isn't only the green-building features that have become fashionable in recent years. It also brings together a range of the newest internet-based technologies: it can monitor how many people are on each floor and who is coming and going, and it can adjust light levels at individual desks and indoor humidity and temperature in small local zones.

To help the building run more "intelligently," Deloitte built a dedicated app for The Edge, with core technology that records the data each employee shares. In other words, as long as you're willing to share what you do, everything from the moment you get up in the morning is already connected to this building.

The app works like a personal assistant.

When you drive up, a camera photographs your license plate to confirm who you are, the garage door opens on its own, and the app finds you an empty parking space in real time.

If you have no fixed desk, the app reads your schedule for the day and picks a work area for you as you come in: a standing desk, a place to sit, a place to lie down, a conference room if you need to talk something through with colleagues, a spot in the sun, or a booth where you can nap. All of these personal preferences can be met.

Smarter still: set your preferred light level and room temperature in the app, and wherever you go in the building's private areas, the app adjusts your surroundings to match.

Been at it a while and need a coffee? Walk into the Café Bar and the machine already knows whether you take an Americano or a latte.

Before you leave you can order groceries for dinner, then pick them up fresh on your way out and cook at home.

Your phone and this custom-built app are all you need to move through the building. Every desk here has a wireless charger, and there are screens in every corner that connect wirelessly to a phone or a computer.

Five Ideas for Using Technology to Set Employees' Creativity Loose

One is Steelcase, a long-established American company that makes office furniture and studies workplaces. The other is Microsoft, the world's biggest supplier of operating systems and office software. This March the two unveiled a set of jointly developed workspaces whose defining feature is advanced technology built in.

The five new "Creative Spaces" join Microsoft Surface devices to Steelcase's architecture line and furniture, showing how Steelcase and Microsoft can help a company set every employee's creativity loose.

Jeff Link, a reporter for the business magazine Fast Company, tried one of them — the Ideation Hub, which is essentially a conference room — at this year's NeoCon interior-design and office-furniture show in Chicago. In his account the room is bright and full of color, and employees can sit on tall stools covered in shaggy, plant-like fabric.

In this space you won't find the dull straight-grain rectangular table of the standard meeting room, and nobody is hunched over a laptop running slides. Nor do you get the old video-conference moment where lag or a weak signal freezes someone's smile into something stiff and strange.

The room has a Microsoft Surface Hub in it, a screen more than two meters across set into the wall. Employees can mark up documents with a stylus; the notes are saved to the cloud and pushed to your laptop. You can read the whole spreadsheet, the budget, the legal team's notes and more. A colleague in Munich can take notes too, or share what they're thinking at the same moment.

This is the two companies' attempt to fold space and technology together. As Sara Armbruster, Steelcase's vice president of strategy for research and new business innovation, sees it: "The problems people face at work today are far more complex than they used to be. They need new creative ways of thinking, and the work process itself has to be remade."

Bob O'Donnell, founder of the market-research firm TECHnalysis Research, said: "Right now most employees have a work environment that's behind the times and technology that's behind the times too, which makes it hard for them to work in creative new ways. The point of designing creative spaces is to close the gap between space and technology, so that creativity comes out of the work more naturally."

The Ideation Hub isn't only meant to let team members — in the same office or scattered across locations — create, refine and share ideas together. It is also built on the idea that space shapes behavior, and is meant to encourage everyone to join in and to contribute as equals.

Besides the Ideation Hub, the "Creative Spaces" include the Focus Studio, the Duo Studio, the Maker Commons and the Respite Room.

The Focus Studio and the Duo Studio are set aside for concentrated work. The first is for employees who need to be alone with creative work, so their thoughts can settle and run, while still being able to switch quickly into working with one other person. Here an employee can concentrate with a Microsoft Surface Book or Surface Pro 4, letting an idea ripen before sharing it with the team.

The Duo Studio is made for two people working together: two computer setups side by side on height-adjustable desks. The 28-inch display tilts to 20 degrees and lies down like a drafting table, so you can draw on it with a stylus or use it as a touchscreen. The built-in Surface Dial, a wireless rotating controller, replaces floating windows and drop-down menus with shortcuts you scroll through.

It has thoughtful details as well. A recliner sits facing the wall, which gives you a degree of privacy, with a monitor hung on the wall in front of it. Employees can drop into it whenever they need to, lie back and empty their heads, or shift into a more comfortable position to weigh their own ideas. They can also invite someone in to share work quickly on the Surface Hub. Call it a space that balances privacy, focus, making things and time off.

Jeff Link described the Maker Commons as a "medieval living room." On one side, around a coffee table, are low sofas, cushioned chairs and potted plants; on the other, a table about as tall as a bar stool, a pendant lamp above it and a clear view of a Surface Hub screen. Two or three employees can sit comfortably with a cup of coffee, or kick around new ideas in a less formal way.

The Respite Room offers real privacy. On a carpet that looks like turf sits a yellow fabric recliner — an atmosphere for thinking loosely and letting the mind wander.

Apple's New Headquarters, Apple Park, Turns Technology and Intelligence Into Details You Can't See

Two weeks ago Apple launched three new iPhones. Getting as much attention as the iPhone X, whose screen covers nearly the whole front of the phone, was the venue for the event — the Steve Jobs Theater — and the new Apple headquarters around it, Apple Park.

At least from the Apple Park details made public so far, its visible smart equipment isn't the "personal butler" kind Deloitte has. But from something as small as a door handle to something as large as its shock absorbers, this campus — possibly the most expensive corporate campus ever built — is shaping, in its own way, what it means for an office building to get smarter.

Norman Foster, the lead architect on Apple Park, has been an Apple partner for years; his team designed many of Apple's newer stores around the world. This architect, who likes designing enormous buildings, is best known in China for Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital airport.

But no project has been more special to him than Apple Park.

He can still recall meeting Steve Jobs for the first time, in 2009: "Steve had a very clear picture of the new campus. He wanted the building to 'lie' on the ground and blend into the landscape around it. From the door handles to every building material, he was obsessive about every detail."

Six years after Jobs's death, Apple Park is finally finished. This last work he took part in is full of his ideas about the office of the future, his attention, and his fussiness over detail.

The ring-shaped main building, which looks like a spaceship, is called the Ring. To survive earthquakes it sits on giant steel base isolators that let it move 1.37 meters in any direction and keep working.

Jobs disliked air conditioning and hated electric fans, and he made exacting demands of the new office's ventilation: he wanted a building that could breathe. In the final design the team put sensors on the vents and their actuators to read where the wind is coming from and how the air moves. Water pipes run through the floors and ceilings, holding the temperature between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius; the cooling or heating system only starts up when it gets too hot or too cold.

Both Jobs and Apple's current chief design officer, Jonathan Ive, love glass to the point of obsession. Jobs wanted a glass door for the campus restaurant that could open by itself in 12 seconds, erasing the line between inside and out.

That giant glass door now stands on the outside of the café, running the full four-story height. Each panel weighs 200,000 kilograms, and control gear buried underground lets the sliding doors open and close quietly.

Jonathan Ive, who has worked on the design of every Apple product since 1997, contributed a great deal to Apple Park as well.

He took the desks and chairs on himself. Every Apple employee's desk adjusts its height automatically, with the button set underneath. So that people could change the height fast, the buttons were shaped as a bump and a dip: press the raised one to lift the desk, the recessed one to lower it — obvious and easy. The desk went through several rounds of revision to find room to tuck away all the charging cables and wires.

The human touches extend to food. Thinking of employees who want to carry pizza from the café back to their work pod, Francesco, who designed the Apple Park café, invented a patented pizza box with small vents that let the steam out, so the crust doesn't go soggy.

Just how many hidden details this $5 billion campus holds, though, may only emerge as the employees moving in over the coming months work it out for themselves.

One piece of good news: the campus visitor center, which cost nearly $80 million, is done. When it opens, it may be worth a look — if you have enough curiosity, and enough of a budget.

Image sources: Steelcase, Apple, Bloomberg, Dezeen