The news that the official human population of the Earth had exceeded seven billion for the first time, as of October 2011, provoked the expected bout of soul searching and anxiety. Many of the concerns expressed were nakedly Malthusian in their pessimism.
Although people might have assumed we’d left behind this kind of flawed thinking, there is obviously something appealing about the idea that exponential population growth is unsustainable when resources increase only in arithmetical terms. What we should have learned in the two centuries since Thomas Malthus first popularised the idea, is that there are complex and interrelated factors that can influence the resources we need to survive, not least in terms of greater efficiency in the way we produce them.
A similar debate is also apparent in the way in which the commercial property market is able to offer the right sort of buildings for modern organisations. “It’s always been a complex equation at the best of times,” says Ann Clarke of Claremont Group Interiors. She feels that the accelerating pace of change in technology and working practices is making things ever-more challenging.
“The major complicating factor here is how to square a relatively fixed resource like a building with the demands of its occupants, when the occupants and their demands can change from day to day,” she says. “Add in the need to keep costs down and organisations soon begin to sweat more out of their assets.”
Packed to the rafters?
The most immediate manifestation of this is the ongoing pressure on space allocations for employees. In its 2009 Guide to Specification, the British Council for Offices reported that the average occupational density of a British office had increased by around 40 per cent since 1997.
As a result, the BCO increased its density standard from the previous advisory 12-17 square metres (129-183 square feet) to 8-13 square metres (86-140 square feet) per person. The new average benchmark for the office environment has been set at 10 square metres (108 square feet). Just two years on, even this is now generally seen as high especially in sectors such as financial services.
“This figure conceals another layer of complexity because it is not based solely on the number of people who work nine to five in a fixed place in an office. It is also based on a new idea of the office as a base to work from, for an increasingly mobile workforce,” explains Clarke.
“The idea that this would come to pass has been with us for some time,” explains Paul Statham of Condeco Software. He recalls a time when there was great deal of talk about hot-desking and flexible working nearly 20 years ago with many predicting the death of the office. “Personally, I try to remember that we are only human. The majority of people will always need or want to go out to work. But there’s no doubt that things are changing beyond recognition,” he says.
Clarke agrees, suggesting that the past few years have seen structural changes in the way firms design and manage their workplaces. “Mobile technology and new working practices have meant that time is no longer the fixed element that determines the way we use space. It has become a variable and that has changed everything.”
For Clarke, technology in particular has been a catalyst for change. “The mobile workforce is a consequence of the mobile technology it uses. Even for office based employees, flat screens have been a powerful force for change by shrinking workstation footprints by around a fifth and allowing more people to work in the same space.”
Clarke cites the humble bench desk, which is often the core element of an office furniture installation, as the key manifestation of the change, an opinion echoed by Grant Morrison of Methis Furniture. “The bench is absolutely a product of the times,” he says. “There are very good reasons why, with all the space planning and product options now available to us, that a product like a bench should have taken off in quite the way it has.”
It has significant advantages and simply represents the best response to contemporary needs in terms of its simplicity, flexibility, space efficiency, price and ability to create environments for team working and desk sharing.
Infrastructure issues
But increasing the occupational density of a building is not just an interior design issue. “One of the major implications of change is the impact it has on the building’s infrastructure,” says Ann Clarke. “When you increase the number of people in a given space, that inevitably has a major effect on the specification of the building. Toilets have to be specified accordingly, for example. So too, environmental systems, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, electrical systems, escape routes — all these elements must be dealt with intelligently.”
One of the biggest challenges comes with buildings that have been designed for the past, a place where they do things very differently. Clarke is convinced that this one of the reasons why the fit-out and refurbishment of existing buildings is now such a focus of the work we do.
Old school ties
As well as the time lag in the property sector, health and safety legislation is also playing catch-up. For example, when it comes to providing a productive working environment in terms of air quality, most of the existing regulations are related to dated models of space allocation; most guidance is based on the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 and the Display Screen Equipment regulations of the same year.
“Both sets of regulations are clearly outmoded,” says Tabish Aiman of DAS Business Furniture. “The regulations are based on old technology and determined by the ceiling heights of old buildings.”
Aiman explains that DSE regulations are based on people using cathode ray tube monitors and desk-based working with a single, fixed PC, which we also know is no longer the case for the majority of people.
While there is also a general duty of care under the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974, which covers pretty much everything without going into specifics, there is still a problem with the Workplace Regulations in that they ask for things like ‘a sufficient quantity of fresh or purified air’. The problem comes, according to Aiman, when you come to define ‘fresh’ and ‘sufficient’.
The regulations also fail to fully take into account other factors such as humidity, airborne particles and chemicals, heat, air conditioning, planting, smells and so on. In many cases, it is up to facilities managers to set their own parameters.
Your space, or mine?
One other aspect of working culture that is likely to act as a brake on the relentless increase in occupational densities is that of personal space. Already, we are seeing signs that we may be at the limit of people’s tolerance for the presence, smell, sight and sound of other people. Hence the growth of interest in the subject of proxemics, which is the study of measurable distances between people as they interact.
“The human element also acts as a limit on occupational densities in other ways,” adds Statham. “The evolution of technology has allowed us to make almost limitless changes in the way we use workspaces. Yet people are still essentially the same creatures that were hunting and gathering over 50,000 years ago and we must work with that knowledge when designing and managing offices.”
According to Statham: “Technology may have driven the underlying changes in the first place, but it is a great enabler of a new kind of approach,” he concludes. “In any system with people involved there is a natural brake on going too far, but there are plenty of opportunities to strike the right balance.”
