Most federal agencies are facing unrelenting budget pressure to drastically cut costs and do more with less. Real estate and facilities groups are now tasked with not only meeting short-term housing needs, but also planning for future leasing and space requirements, while reducing their overall footprint and improving agency performance.
Amsterdam’s Alphabet Building is a prime example of Beta Space in action.
The idea of sharing office space has been around for over a decade, but only in the past few years has that idea evolved from employees simply sharing contiguous physical space into something much more exciting: coworking. Coworking’s simple tagline: “Working alone sucks, come and join the coworking revolution” says it all, as do the metrics associated with the coworking environment: According to Global Enterprise, an economic think tank based in Brussels, about 87 percent of coworkers start new projects with others they meet in their space. Other statistics from the Global Coworking Study shared by DeskMag, the magazine about new type of work places, indicate that 86 percent have built their business network thanks to coworking, and 57 percent work in teams more often.
The corporate executive suite. The term might conjure up images of a cavernous, wood-paneled private office with fireplace and an over-sized portrait of the founder, or maybe a stark white modernist take a la a Bond villain. There’ll be huge windows with million dollar views, a luxurious private washroom, and maybe even a terrace. Television and movies have shaped most people’s conception of the C-suite; fictional extremes of reality and, truth be told, they weren’t always so far off the mark.
Philip Tidd 
The office is striking back. After years of unprecedented technological, economic and societal change, companies are re-establishing the physical work place as the first choice place to work for a liberated and mobile workforce. The next decade will see even more change in the world of work, and I believe it will have even more of an impact on office design than what has taken place in the last 20 years.
Sonya Dufner 
As a workplace strategist, I spend my days learning how the design of workspace can influence and engage people to share ideas and build relationships. A trend I’m seeing is activity-based planning, which means that people in a workspace can choose where to work based on what they need to do at any given time. For this to work, there needs to be variety of spaces for interaction and focused work.
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