This article began as a monologue about resolving long-standing sustainability issues facing the Workplace industry. But really, who needs another monologue? And so it became an exchange of views between Ana Rita Martins, of the generation inheriting the planet and myself, of the generation that arguably has done more than…

It’s been an inauspicious year for Workplace. Amid the bluster, little has been resolved. There’s been a gradual return to the office for many, but for most of those only partial. Levels of occupancy are still around half of pre-pandemic levels by most measures, which (as has been increasingly understood)…

Imagine a workplace where everything with which you interacted was entirely seamless — people, systems, processes, environments. Where you didn’t have to deal with multiple access routes to information and services, where a task requiring multiple disciplines to respond didn’t require that you act as both bridge and interpreter. …

There’s a good chance my new book isn’t for you. It’s probably not for far more people than it’s for. Which makes me wonder why I wrote it in the first place. But now it’s out at the end of this month, published by the most excellent Zer0 Books, fair…

The open plan office often comes in for a pasting, particularly from journalists. The derogatory bandwagon was up on the ramps for much-needed running repairs during the pandemic, but is now back on the road, shuttling the ill-informed and irrationally-charged between small towns on both sides of the Atlantic. While…

I could have just left it all alone. Not bothered, I could have assumed my place in the exacerbated sense of post-pandemic powerlessness and sought to minimise the damage until habituated. I could have chucked another compliant and well-organised text into the overcrowded melee, hacked a few talks on the…

Literally everything as a service. On demand, at the end of a command for the purpose, the obsequious flunkification of life. An endgame. We own nothing yet want for nothing. We decide what, when, how and where, and summon it. A paradoxical anti-capitalist capitalism. It’s nothing short of exhausting just…

The idea that if you’re not for something you’re against it has deep historical roots. It’s often intentionally used as a polarising device, offered as a choice imbued with urgency, one to which we should have an instant response because we know which side we’re on. We’re friend or foe…

As the London commercial property market reaches a level of activity not witnessed since Covid began, so too does the temperature under the collar of the political establishment about working somewhere other than all this booming commercial property. Whether it’s the PM exposing his own disinterest when faced with the…