This one day event, Unwired’s Worktech North, brought to the shores of Salford Quays, Manchester c/o the North West Development Agency and MediaCity:UK, explored a futurologists and near futurologists vision of how digital technologies will evolve cities, and specifically our workplaces. Speakers from world-leading digital city projects in Spain, Finland, USA and UK gave us an insight into the workplace technologies of the near-future and new digital design for work and living.

Michael Joroff, a guru among many from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, started off by telling us:

A city is a city.
A ‘second city’ is a city in Second Life.
A ‘third city’ is a connection between the physical and virtual, like a phone call connects the physical using virtual technology. A world of ‘bricks and clicks’ – both are needed, yet some things you can only do in one and some things only in both places.

‘Media city’ becomes not physical but a place in your mind.

Ambient technology, or pervasive technology, is experienced any time, any place. Wifi allows you to respond to your environment – in the future broadband/wifi will become the norm, cities without it will be disadvantaged.

What the media city will look like:

• Digital cities will have experimental street lighting – bright for single women, playful colours when the pubs close.

• Responsive buildings with “skins” will respond to their inhabitants – depending on volume, density, time of day etc.

• Interactive transport – delivery based on demand rather than a rigid timetable.

• Interactive kiosks – build around communities of interest.

• Also permeable walkways, interactive buildings with interactive display screens.

Then let’s all have a ‘flash mob party’ – it happened in Feb 07 when 300o people arrived through a bluetooth message in Paddington to come down to the station, tune in to a channel and dance, silently, listening to the DJ playing on their iPods.

Jose Carlos Arnal told us about the Digital Mile project.

Zaragoza is Spain’s 6th largest city. Spain’s ambition is for 50Mb connectivity – the ‘digital divide’ in the future will be between not the ‘have’s’ and the ‘have not’s’ but between high and low speeds of connectivity – everyone will need to be digitally literate in the 21st century.

The Digital Mile, developed with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, incorporates pervasive media into all parts of the public realm in an experiment to enable technology to make the space more useful, enjoyable, playful, and colour the user’s mood.

Permeated by a central digital walkway, virtual waterfalls and interactive fountains are triggered by commands. Intelligent street lighting adjusts according to time, day and artistic expression. Street furniture pratically displays timetables, menus, parking availability.

Kari Raina then talked about another future city in Arabianranta (Helsinki Virtual Village), a residential area which the Helsinki authorities want to transform into a leading centre for design and industry before the decade end. Then there will be 10,000 residents, 8,000 jobs and 6,000 students there. It is part of a European network of living labs. Raina claims there is a need for political and business leaders to have buy in and believe in the benefits of investing in the digital city.

Each household appoints an eHousemanager prior to moving onto the site and six universities and technical colleges in the city worked together to produce content. Apartments all have 10Mb broadband installed, there is a household of mentally disabled people – it’s a true social experiment in an inclusive, digital community. People are inspired to come here to share the experience.

Philip Vanhoette from Plantronics and Philip Ross from Cordless Group talked about “Technology in the Digital Age”.

Vanhouette argues that broadband is essential – like hot water…or loo roll.

Terrifyingly, email represents 40% of all our communications, taking up a minimum of 2 hours a day (10 years a lifetime!). Of which 1/3 are irrelevant, 1/3 are important, 1/3 are essential.

Microsoft’s Powerpoint is 20 years old – some sectors (like sales) spend 50% of their time reading, preparing and presenting with it.

Hard rules (from Ross’s 2006 book “Space to Work – Space Strategies for Knowledge Workers” – Jeremy Myerson and Phillip Ross):

• Presentations sent to everyone 24 hours before meeting

• Bonuses for short meetings

• Red light messenger – switch off more regularly, don’t be ‘always on’

Comprising of a wheel in 4 quadrants, put simply, spaces to work break down into:

• Academy (colleagues) HIGH VISIBLE Agora (customers)

• Lodge (family) live/work LOW VISIBLE Guild (peers) collaborative

The UK has too many ‘landscape’ open plan offices – too many distractions and too loud.

A nomadic worker’s dream: cheap/free wifi and a quiet lounge.

Philip Ross continued. MySpace has 480 million users, but Murdoch is a digital immigrant not a digital native.

Work is changing:

• 1 in 4 children have a web page

• 1 in 2 people have worked for their company less than 5 years

• A new blog is created every second

• 2.7 billion google searches performed daily

• The number of SMS sent daily exceed population of the planet

• Reading The Times for one week contains more knowledge than a 16th century person learnt in their lifetime

• The speed of knowledge doubles every 72 hours

• Half of what you are taught on your degree is out of date by the end of 1st year

• 33 million in US use mobile to surf web

• By 2011 there will be 4 billion mobile phones

• By 2050, a £500 computer will be more powerful than the entire human species

Not to scare you or anything.

The solution?
The semantic web – FUSE – Find, Use, Share, Expand

You cannot control, only improve. Life and work is a continual Beta (like Google, everything in perpetual Beta). Google is the most valuable brand in the world at $80 billion.

Digital cities are about interconnecting objects – in the future devices will talk to each other.

Pervasive internet/ubiquitous computing/machine-to-machine communications – all terms for “the internet of things”.

• RFID – they now build 1.7 billion units a year, at just 4 cents a piece

• RFID – digital mousetrap in Wembley Stadium

• RFID – food products, log on to web to see what’s in your fridge

• RFID – your washing machine – knows what clothes you’ve put in, the machine does washing automatically

• RFID – Walmart replace the barcode with RFID tags

Clive Wilkinson, one of the world’s leading workplace architects, took the mantle with his talk on “Creative Space at Work”.

Workplace needs to be fit for the IDEA, to advance the PRODUCTION economy.

Small company = extended family
Large company = a community, with complex problems

Planning ideas he helped to deliver:

• WIRED magazine – ‘slinky planning’ – ‘leaking’, creates neighbourhoods

• Chiata – advertising ‘village’ – 500 people on one floor, creatives next to ‘central park’, basketball court, ‘main street’

• Palotta – office made of used shipping containers

• Mother (London) – started as 6 people at the kitchen table, which grew and grew… now UK’s No. 1 ad agency, big planks of kitchen tables. 4 week ‘random rotation’ of desks.
  

Google HQ project
Objectives:

• 1 – Circulation

• 2 – Enclosed meeting space

• 3 – Network learning

• 4 – Work/life balance

• “hot” areas – community, louder, social

• “cold” areas – private, studious

They created permeable spaces/zones:

• Meeting tree – permanent

• Slinky zone – temporary

• Service zone – on demand

• Club house – always there

Frank Duffy from DEGW (author of “The New Office”) chaired the concluding panel discussion on “Creating the Digital Workplace”.

Duffy gave an insightful overview of the history of workplace design. Workplaces are ‘mini cities’.

• 21st century office = security, sustainability, serendipity – the networked office – modular

• 20th century Taylorist Office – destroying guilds and workplace, creating the production line. Control – people in their place. Towerblocks – hierarchical – developer led

• Social Democratic Office (post WWII) – shared spaces

• 19th century, Bank of England – a walled ‘fortress’ but with public places for clients to walk which became an attraction

Business imperatives drive design – potential exceeded by measurables (the easiest things to measure are usually the least important?)

In the future, patterns of work and usage of cities/places will become more variable (varying density) and more permeable.

Chris Kane, Head of Workplace at BBC and leading the BBC’s input into MediaCity:UK talked more about the project and showed a rather overblown video about how great it will all be when it’s finished. Kari Raina earlier told us Salford was port of England, MediaCity will be the portal of England.

A Media City needs to holistic and mix A grade with B, C and D office space. It needs to be comfortable, in variance to its inhabitants, from luxury to rugged depending on what/whom.

Buildings should be ‘future proof’, to change in the future, internal more important than external architecture.

In conclusion, many of the ideas and designs discussed today were futuristic, dazzling and almost unbelievable – were it not for the fact that they are already happening. It seems a long way from reality that media cities and advanced workplace technologies will be implemented by anything but the most leading edge companies and most progressive (and wealthy) town planners. Despite a recent trade mission by Arts Council West Midlands, Linz is still a long way from Coventry. And when it comes to civic design on a grand scale, the political buy-in and funds need to be in place – a hard battle for many British cities tackling great needs in housing, education and economic change.