We usually inhabit three kinds of places, first place as our immediate home, second place as our workplace and third place as a social surroundings which separate the two primary places. Third places usually comprised of cafes, libraries, parks, clubs et al. They form the fabric of in between spaces and bind the various environments that we inhabit. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg first spiked this conversation through his remarkable books, “Celebrating the Third Places” and “The Great Good Place”. Any urbanist, social scientist, social urbanist or urban designer who is interested in learning about synergies of places and how spaces interact with each other and people, his books are absolutely great and a must read. Oldenburg’s third place research is based around the primary social spaces that people occupy: work and home being first and second. While work is a structured and formal social experience and home is a private experience, third places are more relaxed environments in which people feel comfortable and to which they return time and again to socialize, to relax, and to enjoy the company of those around them. A cohort of regulars is what makes a third place.
However, boundaries between places have blurred and activities have filtered into different spaces. We now have cafes in our workplaces and we have taken work to our cafes. That said, our workplaces are no longer a place for just single dimensional work but a place, a community, which provides a social glue and identity, to sharing ideas, purpose and meaning. This places a different kind of approach and design intent when we design our workplaces.
Good third spaces are abuzz with conversation and yield spontaneous relationships between people from different social and economic backgrounds—essential for building strong communities, creating empathy between people, and maintaining a view of oneself as part of a something larger. And we have come to expect these things from our workplaces and this urges us to look at workplace as not just a place we go to but also which gives us purpose, identity and build meaning.
Flexible spaces, coworking spaces, communal spaces, superior amenities are all here to stay when we design our workplaces including one or more of these components. Our workplaces are expected to support various work styles and act as dynamic spaces which accommodate functions which are experiential and those that we identify with our lifestyles. Workplaces are being designed as communities beyond the singular function alone. This shift is here to stay.
Building owners, landlords, are experimenting this with their commercial assets and making an effort to gear them more towards third places. Lounges, cafes, gymnasiums, event spaces, vibrant activity spaces are all being considered into the building amenities. We will see this trend grow and we will expect our workplace to function as a place to collaborate, socialize, form bonds and identities and not just work and go home. So just like how we expect multi-functionality from our everyday devices, we expect our workplace to be more than just a space for working alone to identify with. We may just have a term in near future called IoW – Internet of Workplace.
