Is workspace headed for the Airbnb model?

While in Seattle this week to speak to both the local CoreNet chapter and NBBJ – architects of both Amazon’s new downtown headquarters (seen above) and Google’s Bayview campus – I was interviewed by the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce about my thoughts on the future of workspace. The story and interview by Lynn Porter are published below.

What does Greg Lindsay, a two-time champion on the game show “Jeopardy,” know about designing office space?

You can find out at 11:30 a.m. tomorrow when Lindsay gives a talk at the University of Washington Botanic Gardens. The event is being presented by the Washington chapter of CoreNet Global, an association for people involved in corporate real estate and related services. The cost to attend is $30 for CoreNet members and $60 for non members. Register at http://tiny.cc/ou6wfx/.

Lindsay’s talk is titled “Engineering Serendipity” because he believes the best ideas at work come from a chat around the water cooler rather than at meetings. He said offices ought to be designed to make those chats happen more often.

There’s too much Class A office space on the market worldwide, Lindsay said, and he expects to see corporations shrink their footprints. All that dead office space must be reconfigured to foster collaboration and new ideas, he said.

Owners and developers should seed office buildings with creative types to attract other tenants, he said.

“If you’re in the business of building an office, it’s no longer about throwing up a mid-rise building,” Lindsay said. “It’s about cultivating the people inside it. Having a lot of smart, interesting and creative people can definitely be attractive to a lot of clients.”

Lindsay is a contributing writer for Fast Company, coauthor of “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next” and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, where he leads the Emergent Cities Project.

He is also working with OMA, Rem Koolhaas’ international architecture firm, and the firm’s research studio, AMO, to explore how cities, office space, the cloud and Big Data connect.

Lindsay is also the only person to beat the IBM supercomputer Watson at “Jeopardy” in an untelevised sparring match.

He got interested in workplace design when he did a talk at what is now BlackBerry. The talk got him thinking about how to create a “killer app” for people in cities – one that would introduce people to each other, help them find people around them and analyze why they should know certain people.

All this “led me to a work context,” he said, which is how he got interested in office design as a way to help people be more creative, productive and collaborative.

Lindsay points to a 17-year study of researchers at a higher education campus in Paris. Researchers who had to move from building to building because of an asbestos cleanup did more influential work and published more “because they were bumping into new neighbors,” he said.

Such studies show that serendipitous encounters can lead to big ideas, but he said it’s difficult to know exactly which ones will get those results.

“It’s very hard to find metrics around serendipity,” he said. “How do you measure value around an unknown? Companies are basically doing it with crossed fingers. They know it works they just don’t know when it works. How do you take what many people would call luck and then make it repeatable?”

A number of companies are giving it a shot, Lindsay said, mentioning Amazon.com in Seattle and Zappos in Las Vegas, where CEO Tony Hsieh is building a creative-class company town. Other examples are the redevelopment of 1407 Broadway, an office tower in Midtown Manhattan; and the 5M project in San Francisco that is being designed to attract technology companies, arts groups, small retail shops and residents.

The DJC asked Lindsay about the workplace. Here is what he said:

Q: What is engineering serendipity?

A: The idea of “engineering serendipity” refers to creating environments and organizations that are more fertile for unexpected encounters or collaboration than say, your typical office or corporate bureaucracy. It’s rooted in the notion that organized approaches to discovering new ideas are at least reaching their limits, if not failing at it altogether. Every company wants to be innovative, but they’d like to schedule that innovation to happen at the 10 a.m. meeting. It doesn’t work that way, of course, and yet we go on pretending it does.

In comparison, look at cities, which are messy, creative and productive in ways a single corporation could never be. That’s because they’re all about the chance encounter at the coffee shop, the pivotal introduction by a mutual friend, and hashing out ideas at the bar rather than keeping them under wraps. So, is there a way to organize and manage work that’s less like an office and more like a city?

Q: How do you create more fertile workplaces?

A: Companies have been trying to engineer serendipity for years without calling it that. Bell Labs invented the transistor, the laser, communication satellites, and more by combining researchers from multiple disciplines in a lab and culture that encouraged them to collide with each other.

Now, you have Google, Facebook, and Amazon designing campuses to maximize the number of unplanned meetings and conversations in a crossed-fingers attempt to introduce employees who might have otherwise never met — and who will hopefully come up with the next big thing.

But they’re not going nearly far enough. The next steps are to make organizations more permeable — by either welcoming outsiders into the office or else sending employees into workplaces across the city — and using social networks to understand who’s really working together and who should be. This is the subject of my next book, thanks to the generosity of the Knight Foundation.

Q: Why should developers and architects care?

A: Once you change focus from increasing efficiency to cultivating serendipity, your entire approach to workspaces, real estate and the city changes. Instead of a cost to be cut, now it’s a resource to be managed. And instead of dwelling on space per employee, it becomes a question of who they’re working with and how much value they’re creating — which means increasing the intensity of the spaces you have, and more time spent working in places you don’t usually, whether that’s coffee shops, co-working spaces, or even other companies’ offices.

This has huge implications for real estate, obviously. A few years ago, the architect Frank Duffy asked whether he and his colleagues were “slaves at the mill,” churning out office space nobody needed. I think he was right. It’s only a matter of time before we see the Airbnb of office space, and you won’t choose to work someplace because it’s cheap, but because you want to work with someone in that office.

Q: Are there places where this has worked?

A: Here are two. WeWork opened its first co-working space in Manhattan four years ago; it plans to have 29 locations in seven cities by the end of this year, with nearly 3,000 members. It’s already one of the largest commercial landlords in New York, but it’s able to command a premium because it’s selling prospective members access to its network, rather than just a desk.

You’re paying to meet other talented people, ones you don’t know but won’t find under an employer’s roof, which is why American Express and Merck have stationed teams there as well.

Maybe the most ambitious attempt to engineer serendipity is in Las Vegas, where Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is spending $350 million of his money building a creative class company town called the Downtown Project. Hsieh talks openly about encouraging “collisions” between his employees and the various startups that have relocated there. He promises working downtown “will make you smarter,” because downtown equals density, which leads to serendipity, which in turn leads to new connections and ideas. That’s the plan, anyway.

Q: Why not organize workspaces to mirror functions or hierarchies?

A: Hierarchies are great when you have a task at hand and you want it repeated as much and as fast as possible. But they aren’t much good when you don’t know what you’re doing, or who should be doing it. People talk all the time about being multi-disciplinary, but I like how the MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito takes it a step further and declares himself “anti-disciplinary.”

Because the moment you think of yourself as belonging to a discipline, you will limit your exposure to people outside of it.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a great track record of consciously deciding who we should work with, befriend or even fall in love with. So why not serendipity?