Abstract
The paradigm shift in work dynamics in the digital age leads the evolution of how and where people work. Knowledge workers adopt more flexible working styles: they connect to their laptops and work anywhere. The main disadvantage of this way of working is social isolation. Creative industries often require interdisciplinary interaction and collaboration. Coworking spaces have emerged in order to remove this isolation and create a third place apart from home and office. These spaces have been studied by disciplines such as economics, work psychology, and geography but studies on their spatial characteristics are limited. The aim of the chapter is to propose a conceptual framework to identify design implications for the coworking spaces in terms of spatial preferences of users. Accordingly, literature related to changing work dynamics and workplaces, rise of coworking spaces, and coworking space typology are discussed. The conclusion of the chapter is to propose design implications, which will inform designers, researchers, and managers on best practice for coworking space design.
TopChanging Work Dynamics And Workplaces
Workplaces have evolved depending on changes in work organizations and working styles in the historical process. Agricultural societies created workplaces like barns, storerooms and granaries. The transition into industrial societies brought the need for office spaces; consequently, workshops and factories were built in rural areas and skyscrapers were built in city centers. Workplaces have evolved under the influence of information technologies, and they have now progressed beyond office buildings through alternative work methods created by the knowledge society and come to describe any place that houses workers (Çimen, 2008).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Open Creative Labs: These labs can be described as permanent spaces that can be accessed temporarily by different users. Innovation and creativity labs can be classified into five types, namely, grassroots labs, coworking labs, firm-driven innovation labs, academic-driven innovation labs and finally, incubators and accelerators.
Coworking: A new form of work organization that creates cooperation opportunities and encourages a sense of community in a shared space, and gathers employees of different companies and even freelancers with different profiles and objectives.
Community: This term is used to describe digital working models ascribed to the sharing economy, which involves participation without ownership (for instance, carpooling) and contribution without necessarily expecting monetary compensation. In this sense, the term “community” now expresses the presence of other people in other places interested in similar practices rather than a social cluster of close-knit people.
Firm-Driven Innovation Labs: Physical spaces of the open innovation processes of large and mostly multinational corporations. There is limited access to these labs and freelancers and experts from creative industries, research and development agencies and universities are selected to use the lab’s infrastructure.
Learning Centers: Models of integrated services, digital resources and user-orientation providing a network of services, libraries, information gathering, social spaces, study spaces, restaurants, cafés and outdoor areas.
Coworking Spaces: Shared workplaces used by knowledge workers who are often freelancers and at different levels of expertise in the vast area of the information industry. Coworking spaces are “third places”, where workers seek a sense of socialization, opportunities for serendipity and networking encounters to increase their social capital.