Inventing the Future

At Ankrom Moisan Architects in Portland’s Old Town, there are no private offices. Not one.

“That’s just the way our culture is,” says Michael Stueve, a principal at the firm in charge of user experience strategy. “But you will never hear us say let’s do something just because it’s cool. We do it because it solves a need, an issue that the organization is concerned with. It’s tailored.”

Stueve acknowledges that nobody really knows what the future workplace will look like. Office designs have constantly evolved during his 25-plus years as a licensed architect. Inclusivity, however — the need to make all workers comfortable — is one trait that won’t fade away.

“It’s the time in this world to be celebrating all people that come to the office and have them feel welcome, engaged, and included in the conversation,” he says. “Every office needs that.”

Stueve, who has been with Ankrom Moisan since 2017, is licensed to practice in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Arizona. The firm employs more than 300 and has offices in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco.

It’s so challenging to hold a culture together when you’re all working from home.

Some organizations are going all the way. No desks at all. You only come in to collaborate, have team meetings, or client presentations.

One of our design concepts is around collaboration and collision. And the collision means that you provide spaces where you just accidentally run into people, or you can overhear a conversation.

That’s the best kind of mentoring you can do. Mentoring through osmosis and seeing your colleagues, your leaders at work and how they communicate with your client base.

Workplace and hospitality have been on a collision course for 20 years with the introduction in the workplace of the concierge. Now we’re bringing in that kind of residential experience also. It’s the collision of all of those types of spaces that you can work in.

Ten years ago, there was the ubiquitous bright orange wall, the one bright green wall, and you had vinyl graphics all over them. People communicated their culture through environmental graphics. We are so far past that now because that is just a very cold sort of approach to storytelling.

We’ve been afraid to touch anything for three years. People are hungry for tactile experiences. That’s what I think is coming back, that kind of sumptuous experience.

When you’re in an office, you have the choice. You can have loud, rambunctious, collaborative meetings or you can have a space where you can tuck away in the hoteling stations.

It’s the accidental engagement with your colleagues but it’s also your connection with work and daylight and fresh air.

Every organization is different. Some organizations are heavy on hoteling, and they don’t have a lot of assigned seats. But some people are just flat out afraid to share their workspace with other people. They don’t know if it’s clean. You can’t force them to sit at a space where they don’t feel safe.

There’s a huge movement toward little individual phone rooms. What’s interesting is that organizations are finding that some people don’t feel safe using those, either. They don’t know how fresh the air is in those.

There are always going to be assigned desks for various purposes. Some people just work better in a private office. They definitely are getting a smaller footprint, and there’s just less real estate being dedicated to open office.

Even if this pandemic is way in back in our rear-view mirror, we need to be designing to be pandemic ready because there’s quite possibly going to be another one.

I’ve witnessed people being very excited to get back to the office, and then the first time they get invited to a meeting where there’s six people in the same room, they’re like, oh, wait, maybe I better do this virtually.

Private offices to a 24-year old can be kind of creepy. They have never worked like that. They’ve never studied like that. So I would say that younger team members would prefer the open work environment.

That coworking atmosphere is definitely coming into the more formal workspace.

We always are looking for the truth. What’s the honest representation of this business? Many of these organizations need a designer that can take them on a journey and guide them through this process and help them align with their goals.

We have this concept of the office in continuous improvement. It’s kind of a Kaizen approach to running a business. The future of work needs to align strategy with culture and operational goals.

The only way to predict the future is to invent it.