prefab Ultimate Backyard Office

Opening the internet, I find on my customized Google homepage, the title of the third top story of Wired News, Home Office? It’s in the Yard

The “prefab Ultimate Backyard Office” (but why does the prefab UBO have to be that vagueuglytradionallooking?) is intended for individuals working from home. As captions on the images tells us, “Nearly one in six Americans—20 million—works from home at least once a week. Statistics don’t reveal how many have the space for a backyard office.” Cedarshed industries claims that “You can stand up one of these red cedar beauties in just four days, the company claims—making it not much harder to assemble than an Ikea [says to produce “affordable solutions for better living”… so much for the environment!] desk.” Imagine the package shipped to your yard, dis/re-assembled, and transportable from one home to another (this deserves further study!).

The article Home Office? It’s in the Yard, intrigues me for that it reminds me of a work I produced in collaboration with P-A.T. (January 2004): The Nomad Workers: A Business Story was a project for the GSD class #7306, “New Diagnostic Approaches for Practicing Architects,” taught by Karen Stephenson. The study told the story of people working from home, yet all of them being part of a same company.

The Nomad Workers: A Business Story excerpts:

“The following project is based upon the interviews of several employees working in the United States for a French company named [X]. The purpose is to explore the major issues and implications related to the nomadic way of working within a large company, and to show that design could be one of the key solutions in this perspective. After highlighting these issues through the use of a scenario, we will in the end come up with a set of design schemes enabling nomadic behaviors while resurrecting “trust” and social threads amongst nomad workers.

Although it is known that, in this type of business-centered interviews, “what people say they do and think they do is not the truth,” the questions were focusing on the way they were performing or handling they nomadic way of working. If the results of the diagnosis are fictional and intuitive, they gave us a purpose for outlining concepts for nomadic related designs.

[…]

Hence, a “network analysis” unveils management and spatial concerns. Both are solved differently—one through managerial tuning, the other through space—although they are interrelated. Thus, as designers, our expertise is to create spatial solutions in response to the spatial issues unveiled by a “network analysis.” This approach to design demonstrates the crucial role of a “network analysis” for the creation of long lasting and efficient spatial solutions in the new economy.

[…]

As Michel Foucault writes, “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersections with its own skin.” [1] But if we can connect simultaneously, does it mean that those nomads, global workers or ‘corporate gypsies’ weave strong threads of relationships within the workplace which population fluctuates, or even across the globe, no matter the technology involved? We will see that nomadic populations are more fragile in terms of climbing the corporate ladder, as they don’t have much opportunity (or incentive, when space is involved) to build trust which comes with time.

[…]

Concerning the human capital and the networks, as Lesser and Storck explain it, the social capital inside a company can be expressed in terms of three primary dimensions:
“- There must be a series of connections that individuals have to others. In other words, individuals must perceive themselves to be part of a network (the structural dimension).
- A sense of trust must be developed across these connections (one aspect of the relational dimension).
- The members of the network must have a common interest or share a common understanding of issues facing the organization (the cognitive dimension).” [2]

[…]

In relation to the traveling way of working, nomad workers experience a great freedom in their way of organizing the work. The interviews show that this is perceived as a great advantage of these work positions. As [X] explains: “We have a lot of freedom in the way we manage our time: showing up at the office is definitely not a prerequisite and the management is not looking over our shoulder all the time. I really appreciate to be able to allocate one or two hours in the middle of the day to any non-work related activity if I need to. In the end, we usually work more than 40 hours a week.”

[…]

We also learn that the confusion between home and office can as well be seen as an asset and as a problem. The reasoning can be: “The nomad worker is flexible; he can work anywhere; he can work at home if he does not want to go to the office“, as well as “my home has become my office; travelling or not, I am always in a workplace.”

[…]

The blurring of territoriality is not the only fact that troubles [XX]. Since his relocation to a branch office, he clearly feels left apart from what is going on with the management. Information seems veiled, far and foggy. He misses gossips! [XX] says that since his base office is not the headquarters, he feels that the knowledge he could get from his fellow is limited. He is not as efficient in his research of the information. He is invisible to the big bosses, thus he feels disadvantaged to climb the corporate ladder. Although he is keeping some ties with his former colleagues through e-mails and chat, the information gathering (“you don’t look for it, it comes to you”) is limited. Furthermore, the time difference between Europe and the United States allows people to meet electronically for only few hours (lunch time for the US correspond to the time people leave work for Europe). This definitively limits the amount of professional and social interaction amongst people working for the same company.

[And we went on for 30 pages!]

[1] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritcs, vol. 16 (1), 1986, p.22
[2] E. L. Lesser and J. Storck, Communities of Practice and Organizational Performance in IBM Systems Journal, Volume 40, Number 4 (2001), commenting on J. Nahapiet and S. Ghoshal, Social Capital, Intellectual Capital and the Organizational Advantage, Academy of Management Review 23, No. 2, 242–266 (1998)