Changing Workplace : A Workstation That Would Do All the Work

Something’s happening at the office--something’s happening to the office. Experts in disciplines ranging from artificial intelligence to interior design are rethinking how, when, why and where we work. Although their viewpoints and forecasts differ, all agree with Washington strategic planner Maree S. Forbes that “the rate of change in the U.S. workplace is unprecedented in our history and will touch us all.” Times staff writer Connie Koenenn interviews four of the nation’s top thinkers on work-space design.

Paul Saffo works in a traditional office in Menlo Park--a large room, comfortably carpeted and equipped with telephone, computers, a good lamp, chairs and lots of desktop space stacked with reference papers, journals and magazines.

But on a recent trip to Stockholm he continued working, with no office at all. During the day he met with his clients at the Swedish Telephone Co. In the evening, back in his hotel room, he caught up with clients on the West Coast using a cellular phone and the hotel fax machine. Thanks to the time difference, he said, “some of them didn’t even know I had left town.” Saffo cites his experience as indicative of the way electronic communications are reshaping the way we work. “We are definitely heading into a period where we are becoming less desk-bound,” he says. “It won’t happen overnight, but more and more people will start working remotely from their offices.”

And that’s just one change he is forecasting as we sail toward the 21st Century. The electronic revolution, he believes, has only fired its opening shots. He tells his business clients that “we’ve built up a good head of steam with the microcomputer revolution so far, but the real events still lie ahead.” Saffo is not only an expert in the intersections of the computer, video, audio, print and communications technologies, he also is a sideline sociologist, studying the behavioral patterns that accompany technological change.

“When we see a new technology,” he says, “we always overestimate the short-term impacts it brings, then we underestimate the long-term impacts. So we get hit with cultural shock twice.”

Right now, he says, we are winding up 10 years of overestimation--a decade that saw the invasion of personal computers into the American office. As PCs replaced typewriters at an astounding rate, we began to talk and write about a “paperless society” and envision a communications revolution that would bring the world to the office worker’s desktop.

“We predicted that he or she could sit at the PC command post and reach out anywhere around the globe, calling up information from remote databases, and hold meetings by large-screen teleconferencing instead of traveling to out-of-town conferences. The office would be the center of activity.”

The 1990s will see a total reversal of that trend, predicts Saffo.

Instead of bringing the world into the office, we are beginning to use the technology to take our office to the world. “Right now with a cellular phone, portable computer and remote access to your business phone, a person can function effectively on the road, in a car, anywhere outside the office.”

Are we headed for an office-less society? Nothing is clear yet, says Saffo, who likes to point out that the next decade is “going to be full of false starts and all sorts of crazy ideas.”

Nevertheless, there are trends. “For one thing, the ability to work remotely completely dissolves the traditional 9-to-5 working day. For another, there is a clear trend toward teams--so the office of the year 2000 could be relatively smallish office spaces for individuals to work, and a lot of team rooms where groups of six or seven get together.”

And the stand-alone personal computer will undergo a transformation--maybe even a disappearing act, he says, noting that computing power is now being embedded into various other instruments.

“A few years back,” he has written, “I was startled to discover that my laser printer had more memory than the computer it was hooked to. And the telephone on my desk has more horsepower than my programmable calculator. Yet my personal computer still squats on my desktop in a most old-fashioned way.”

Saffo envisions an “intelligent desk--which would also coordinate work flow and communications among a menagerie of intelligent office tools, from fax to file cabinet to workstation.” In short, he foresees an office that would do all the work.

Saffo is a specialist in the long-term impact of new information technologies for Institute of the Future in Menlo Park. He is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Computers and Society, and columnist for Personal Computing Magazine.