The future is clear: Feco

The world of work has been in a state of upheaval for years, with architects, designers and manufacturers clearly playing a central role in the development of new models and concepts in this area. How do we want to work? What measures support a team’s processes? And while a lot has already been achieved in recent years, in Spring 2020, the arrival of the corona pandemic returned these and other questions back to centre stage.

Suddenly, most of us are working from home – and in many cases, it functions surprisingly well. You can skip the commute to work, leave your business attire in the wardrobe and finally receive incoming parcel deliveries in person, yourself. Perfect, right? If we’re honest though, many of us are already longing for the office. Working at home often clashes with home-schooling needs, and we miss the varied inputs and personal interactions of office life. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker shows a woman in an online meeting. Next to her on the table is an open box, and she greets fellow on-screen participants by proclaiming: ‘Good morning, everyone. I brought doughnuts.’

It’s already clear: once the pandemic comes to an end, we will see things differently. At the moment, entrepreneurs and labour researchers around the world are asking themselves ‘What will we actually need an office for in the future?’ Because even before the spread of the coronavirus, there were distinct trends toward mobile working and flexible office design.

So the question remains: how will we work in the future? A topic that is currently of particular interest to a company like Feco. The office experts specialising in modern partition wall systems and office furnishings are already providing insights into their range of concepts and bringing the office of the future into the present, as a user-centred working landscape at the feco-forum showroom in Karlsruhe. Feco calls this visionary laboratory ErlebnisReich. According to the Karlsruhe-based company, the office of tomorrow will not be about replacing workspaces or reducing floor area. If Hamburg trend expert Birgit Gebhardt is to be believed, the future challenge will be to transform offices into spaces for interaction. In other words, places where interpersonal encounters can take place – and which appeal to all the senses.

More than ever, we will need workspaces in the future that don’t simply provide us with a place where we can sit at our desks. We need productive spaces that put people at the centre. Spaces that are deliberately designed with a wealth of different variants in order to stimulate our creativity. In short, we need experiential spaces. Working from home over the past year highlighted how much the quality of our work benefits from a comfortable and appealing environment where we feel at home. With the right furnishings, this conducive effect can also be transferred to the office. Sustainable office spaces offer their users freedom and flexibility. A successful interplay between remote and on-site work creates environments that specifically promote agile working.

All these considerations went into the design of Feco’s ErlebnisReich. The result is a hybrid working environment with varied features and an inviting atmosphere. The different rooms and zones dispense with fixed seating and functions. Instead, users can decide for themselves how to employ the individual areas for specific activities. This allows for flexible usage – whether for concentrated work alone or in pairs or for co-creation and communicative meetings within a team.

None of the six interior zones of Feco’s ErlebnisReich is like any other. Room size, surfaces, materials, furniture – each zone here has been individually designed and equipped, and can flexibly adapt to changing requirements. Incidentally, this does not mean that it requires more floor area. On the contrary: space is apportioned according to the activity of the moment, which results in even more efficient usage.

The ErlebnisReich is based on a typical office floor plan with axes in a 1.35 m grid. What makes the layout special are the Feco partitions that push the boundaries beyond established conventions. Where classic offices would take such a floor space and create twelve workstations in six double offices, the ErlebnisReich distributes them over two large team areas with six workstations each.

As a result, five additional areas for individual, tandem and team-based work have been created. This illustrates how making an office ready for the future does not require new premises, but simply a new perspective. With an individual interior concept and the right partitions, practically any office can be transformed into a working landscape. You can explore the design strategy that is right for you and which helps to promote team spirit. Whichever direction you take, if you want to see for yourself what the working world of tomorrow might look like, pay a visit to the feco-forum in Karlsruhe – and leave the doughnuts at home for the rest of the family.

© Architonic