What Is an Office For?

Offices are changing in response to Covid-19. But many of these shifts aren’t necessarily new, says Jennifer Magnolfi Astill, one of the leading researchers on the evolution of workspaces, and not all will stick. What is increasingly clear, however, is that the pandemic has accelerated the natural evolution of the office away from a productivity space to something else — both a learning space and a space to solve complex problems. So think about what’s happening like a cable subscription: “If we think of the office as a bundle of space applications the way cable TV is a bundle of channels, then the contents of the bundle are changing — and the pandemic is pushing that change farther and faster than it would have otherwise happened.”