Workplace Design shouldn’t be a paint by numbers job.
But there’s one number that interests me in particular.
A recent post by Bruce Daisley caught my eye. He has been looking at some recent research by Leesman showing that the top priority for people is for their workplace to provide a place where they can concentrate on the work they need to do as an individual.
It seems obvious that this should be this case; if you are asking us to come to an office to do the work, then the least we can expect is that we can get the work done there.
But still it seems that in a lot of offices, people feel incapable of being able to achieve both work ‘the verb’ (the actual process of achieving tasks) inside work ‘the noun’ (the place where you go to do them).
A survey last year stated that a fifth of workers were refusing to go back to offices full time simply because there wasn’t the space for them.
So how much space might be the right amount for a living, breathing organisation?
Stories of the Digital Workplace
I have more than a passing interest in this, of course.
From 2013-20, Smithery worked a lot with Paul Chaplin, Dennis Curry, Elisabetta Delponte at the rest of the innovation team at Konica Minolta exploring the near-future implications for offices, with regards to technology. During the research, we realised that no matter how advanced a digital technology was, it still needed situating in the environment in which it would be used.
We developed a simple matrix which talked to the need of information to pass between three domains; people, devices and spaces. It gave us a way to think through what happens to information in a business; how it is created, accessed, stored, archived, combined and more, and crucially where all that happens.
This is probably a really interesting model to revisiting in the age of AI, of course (maybe I’ll write about that another day). For instance, you could overlay the types of information generated, by what, and how, and then explore what kind of information environment your organisation is creating… knowingly or otherwise.
As a strategic device back in 2014, it helped us walk through various different future scenarios about how work might be supported in the future in a workplace rather than just think about it in the individual context.
We made little films like this one (for a speculative system called Cognitive Hub) in 2017, to help aid conversations internally and externally about the coming effects agents and the like might have in a workplace.
We were constantly on the lookout for research that gave us clues about modern workplaces had come about. it was only really through understanding the past and present that we could imagine different kinds of futures.
And it was one of these sources that Bruce’s post made me think back to.
Square Metres Per Person
I had first read this BBC article around the time it was published in 2013. It’s about the evolution of the open plan office, and talked about how British architect Frank Duffy had discovered an office layout plan unlike any he had ever seen before.
Duffy recalled: “The layout was based upon an intensive study of patterns of communication – between different parts of the organisation, different individuals…”
The design was by Quickborner, and was called Burolandschaft – office landscape.
Rather than expand on how that differed from what went before, and has continued through to the present day, I just want to talk about the number.
Because also hidden in this article was a clue for me as to what happens in a well=proportioned workplace.
“German office workers have an average 28.2 sq m of personal space. Their right to elbow room and daylight is enshrined in law. The office buildings that meet such requirements generally have separate wings of long corridors, with small offices on either side. Some, the most ambitious, have a central “street” where employees can come together to collaborate.
In the UK and North America, by contrast, design is mostly driven by cost rather than worker satisfaction, and open-plan layouts remain the norm. In London’s West End, space for one desk (4 sq m) costs £8,500 ($13,000) a year. A private office would cost much more than that – and have a larger carbon footprint.”
The bare minimum legal requirement in the UK is for office workers to have 4.6m m2 (Health and Safety Executive).
The British Council for Offices (BCO) recommendation was for ‘about 10 m2‘ per employee.
Which sounds generous, no? Over twice the legal minimum size. But compared to that German office allowance of 28.2 m2, it feels really quite small. But it’s hard to make a real judgement without being it.
How big really?
It is hard to comprehend these abstract numbers, though. How tight might 10 m2 be? How generous is 28.2 m2?
My first instinct (in the name of experimentation) was that with tight enough prompting, and a few Quickborner illustrations for inspiration, I might be able to tease it out of Claude fairly quickly. After three rounds (the below being the third), I realised the precision of the requirements around the task were significant enough that I should just sketch it myself.
The most annoying part was, despite specifying that there should be desks for 150 people each time, for some unknown reason it would return fewer desks (146, 140) each time. Thanks, Claude.
I quickly mocked up the below in Illustrator instead, based on desks of 1.8m x 0.85m, to see how they’d fit together in little teams, and then what else there is space for. They are to scale again each other here too:
In the smaller layout (10 m2 per person), we see that we have room for a kitchen, and a couple of meeting rooms too.
In contrast, with the larger layout (28.2 m2 per person), I have loads of room to play with. I started by putting in an extra four meeting rooms of the same size. Then a run of project rooms along the wall – for quiet working, contemplation, whiteboards etc. There are breakout spaces, a team meeting area, supplies islands, an extra drinks station.
I’ve not gone to town on Burolandschaft style organic shapes here of desk layouts etc, partly because I don’t have the space for much of it, and mainly because this is just a quickly visual experiment.
The result of which shows us that if you start with more space, you’re forced to come up with ways of using the rest of the space.
There’s a bit of abductive reasoning here perhaps; the space exists, and you start imagining the sorts of things that it might be used for, given the research into a given workplace’s culture you should have carried out.
When work comes full circle
Through 2025, I find myself contemplating workplaces once again.
I’ve been working with the brilliant Tracey Camilleri and Sam Rockey at Thompson Harrison on something that might manifest publicly at some point. It’s around how you might pull together both the social and material layers around workplaces.
It will likely feature some use of Zenko Systems to explore the entanglement of the social and the material through the different layers of working life.
Zenko Systems is a build on Zenko Mapping that I first talked about last year at UX London with The Product of Design talk. Both models are built on the idea of taking Stewart Brand’s pace layers diagrams from How Buildings Learn and the Clock of the Long Now, and weaving them together in a socio-material set of layers.
Brand of course took inspiration from the work of a British architect, whose four original shearing layers for a building were shell, services, scenery and set.
That architect?
Frank Duffy, of course.
Everything really is connected, it seems.
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