In 1921, Yevgeny Zamyatin completed his dystopian novel, We. Set in a future police state where buildings are made almost entirely of glass and the state structured similar to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, privacy is not an option. When George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four he was inspired by We. His novel took the notion of the police state further and described what is now known as the Orwellian society in which the government makes deception and surveillance the modus operandi of everyday life.
A cubicle workspace scene from Playtime (1967) directed by Jacques Tati.
The impact and the implementation of these conditions is often an insidious process and one that emerges from seemingly benign intentions. For some years now, Scandinavian countries have been leaders in the promotion of open and flexible work spaces. With the advances in information technology, high speed networking, and with smart phones and the laptop computers as the primary tools for many office workers, the consequence is that the certainty of having a specific space or desk in a workplace has been greatly undermined. In many organisations there is a significant portion of the workforce that is at any time out of the office. Offices are thus designed with fewer work desks than there are employees. To accommodate high volume attendance days, employers offer instead other spaces to work in such as lounges, coffee-bars and so on. The “regular” desks and chairs are available on a first-come first-served basis, called hot-desking. To deal with the practicalities of staff needing somewhere for their own possessions, everything personal must be fit into a small locker at the end of the day to adhere to a “clean desk” policy. The result is that not only do workers have much less physical privacy, they no longer have the sense of belonging that their own desk and chair once provided. Studies in the field of environmental psychology points to how such work places not only result in less comfortable work environments that reduce rather than increase productive interaction between co-workers, but that they also create less productive employees.
The routine deployment of these substantial changes in our workplaces is now rolling out in other ways as technology moves to public spaces. An idea of how this might play out has been provided in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film, Minority Report. The movie depicts the Washington D.C. PreCrime police force headquarters with a glass wall that is a major architectural element to make the organisation appear transparent with nothing to hide, while in reality it is hiding the biggest secret of all. Simultaneously, beyond the HQ, there are cameras everywhere that capture retina patterns and identify locations, allowing for personalised advertisements as the protagonist runs through shopping malls and streets.
With increasingly more accurate geolocation-aware mobile applications, combined with the trend of people exposing their everyday lives online, it is easy to imagine an imminent future where activities and locations of workers are tracked minutely throughout the day by the corporations they work for so that not only are employees tracked in an office, they are monitored continuously.
Just as glass, steel and electricity made the modern office building possible, the technology of computers and wireless networking has allowed hot-desking to become commonplace. As workplace design moves to become less personal and more machine-like with each technology advancement, we should look with some hope that these same technologies — and others like virtual and augmented reality — can also allow us to co-work virtually from our warm, friendly homes and in our own privacy. That is a comforting thought.