"Designing the office by activity" is something everyone says. But space is not neutral: it enables or hinders. And an activity-based office drawn from a catalogue – so many phone booths, so many lounges – often hinders: the booths stay empty, the desks always full, the informal areas turn into storage. The flaw is almost always the same: the places are decided without measuring how people work.
What it is, in short
Activity-Based Working means no one has an assigned workstation: the office becomes a set of different places – to focus, collaborate, take a call, meet – and everyone chooses where to be according to what they are doing. On paper it frees up space and gives flexibility. In practice it only works if those places are sized on how the company really works.
Data before places: the survey
For us an ABW project does not start from a layout: it starts from data. With interviews and a survey we reconstruct each team's "typical day" – how much focus, how much collaboration and of what kind, how much time off site – bringing out both the stated needs and the latent ones, those no one declares but that the space must accommodate all the same. From there we know how many places are needed, of what kind and in what proportion. It is the same measured data that governs the desk sharing ratio.
The six typical profiles: every mix of activities in the "typical day" corresponds to a desk sharing ratio.
From data to work settings
Only at that point do we design the work settings – the ingredients of space planning. For every activity we identify the area that makes it possible, including the ones that seem superfluous and are in fact decisive. Space shapes people's behaviours, and the initial measurement is what makes these places genuinely used.
Examples of work settings: operational workstation, phone booth, quiet room, meeting room, lounge area, project table, informal area.
From activity to community
ABW organises space by activity. The next step is organising it around the people who work together: this is what we call Community Based Design. We borrow the models of the city – the square, the street, the places of encounter – to give shape to the place where a working community recognises itself, meets and grows.