We are entering a new age of knowledge work: the Remote Era. In a McLuhan sense, the medium of office work has changed. Up until now, everybody thought that their workplaces were shaped by software. Email, Powerpoint, Slack and innumerable line-of-business apps are of course ubiquitous. But software had only ever eaten half of the office. Every job to be done in a typical office was supported by in-person contact. Some of this was explicit: meetings, org-charts, interviews, tea breaks and water coolers. But much of it was implicit: a business district address, an unstated dress code, open plan seats allowing employees to read the hierarchy and ways of working through mimicry. Offices are a technology, and their design embodies centuries of accumulated knowledge.
The Remote Era
The Remote Era
The Remote Era
We are entering a new age of knowledge work: the Remote Era. In a McLuhan sense, the medium of office work has changed. Up until now, everybody thought that their workplaces were shaped by software. Email, Powerpoint, Slack and innumerable line-of-business apps are of course ubiquitous. But software had only ever eaten half of the office. Every job to be done in a typical office was supported by in-person contact. Some of this was explicit: meetings, org-charts, interviews, tea breaks and water coolers. But much of it was implicit: a business district address, an unstated dress code, open plan seats allowing employees to read the hierarchy and ways of working through mimicry. Offices are a technology, and their design embodies centuries of accumulated knowledge.