PART II: WHERE’S THERE?

 

 SECOND OF A TWO-PART SERIES ON THE CURRENT STATE OF “REALITY”

Business journalists are oddly and appropriately beginning to cover interior design stories.  This has grown out of their tracking work attitudes during the current economic crisis, monitoring satisfaction levels in those left unfired, the ones “left” doing their work as well as the multiplying tasks of suddenly laid off former colleagues.

Lately, those stories are shifting into startling coverage of office interior design or re-design.  Start-up companies, typically techie, are “branding” in part through rough, cheap interior design, expressive of “lifestyle” and coolness of their new hires or poaches.  Older, established companies perceiving themselves in competition with start-ups for the zaniest talent might gladly surrender their corporate cool interiors for a rougher, “hang your bike over there and write your notes on whatever wall or table you want” allure of the baby co’s.

The San Francisco Bay Area and slightly to its south, Silicon Valley, are in a full-out race to relaxed office design.  Who’s the cooler company to work for, whose gourmet kitchen or in-house washer/dryers help you get to the ideas you’ve got inside you?  Employees in these earnestly laid back companies reportedly spend immense parts of their days/lives “at work”, on the work premises.  It makes sense there are sofas all around, pool tables, nooks, crannies and alcoves for curling around a laptop and creating or playing games to loosen up for the next inspiration.

This emerging what-might-become-a-trend of hip, cool “offices” comes at the juncture of a more vocal worker rebellion in some sectors against getting louder at work.  Employees have worked from home for a number of years and different businesses have found it a formula that suited their needs but now, the business press is beginning to report, there is a growing demand to work from anywhere else but the office.  Employers are not always keen to comply for a range of reasons, many of which are probably reasonable.

That’s where it stands in some offices these days, a portion of the workforce genuinely not comprehending why their bodies should share space with those other bodies over there.   Increasingly, workers are arriving from something college-y that they found on-line and they’ve got the paper to prove it.  In greater numbers they leave school with memories of a teacher they knew only as a URL and classmates who were hot taglines.

The home away from home, hip new office designs, may be a way through this, although the implication in home-away-from-home is that work is home, work is family, work is play, work is.

In an era that’s witnessing a serious challenge to labor unions and beyond that to the very idea of organized labor or labor’s right to labor on its own behalf, this shift to the 24-hour workspace may be a response of a kind, albeit probably unconscious.

For a Millenial Gen that loves to keep its fingers, especially the thumbs, busy – laptops, smartphones, whatevs – from their point of view, it’s the screen, baby, it’s all about the screen; not where it is, but what it is.  That’s real, dive in and have a swim through the universe. There’s something there for the sixties gapper to “get,” transcendence-wise.

Still, of a clear cool night, when the moon is full, there’s a wistful thought of the world when it was all about the bodies, being together, talking to each other, face to face, lend a hand, pass the pudding, being, being and being.

SOME SOURCES.  

Here are links or references for press articles, just a few of what’s becoming regular reporting:

+http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/25/v-fullstory/2910347/the-face-time-faceoff.html

+http://articles.chicagotribune.com/keyword/dot-com

+New York Times technology writer, Somini Sengupta’s coverage of a Mountain View, California tech incubator community (“Silicon Valley Techies Fight to Save a Popular but Illegal Haven”, August 23, 2012)

+from the NYT “You’re the Boss” entrepreneurial survey, “A Start-Up Prepares Students to Work with Start-Ups”, August 30, 2012, found in the print edition of the NYC, this one’s from the on-line Times blog, “You’re the Boss”

+For a concise review of current employment statistics by age see Tiffany Hsu’s L.A. Times August 24^th article on job patterns, pay scale of millenials:

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-young-millennial-workers-20120824,0,923321.story

+Primary Source was initially alerted to this fascinating design development at the annual June meeting of NeoCon at the Merchandise Mart.  In a good year, like 2012, the design conference reveals exciting emerging workspace design change.  A couple of San Francisco designers gave us a glimpse of what’s happening on the West Coast.   They are Primo Orpilla and Verda Alexander and their design firm is O+A, a burst of tangy air from the Pacific to remind us in the Midwest not to take life so hard.  They have published a densely documented anthology of their design work for a client list of revered tech pioneers as well as promising start-ups.  Their work is a record of how a changing worker mentality is combining with new communications technologies and a dramatically evolving idea of community and authority.  http://www.o-plus-a.com/

 

2-PART LABOR DAY SPECIAL SERIES!

PART I/ WHAT’S REAL?

For the sake of our game of “Bookends” let’s overlook the bias against generalization.  Primary Source has always believed there’s a tasty nut of verity somewhere in a good generalization.  And anyhow, it’s fun.

Here are the bookends:   The so-called “generation gap” of the 1960s and, now, the unacknowledged generation gap of the “Millennials,” that’s what many are calling the 20-ish to 30-ishes.  Internet outlets have called them “Generation Vexed.”  To be sure, in the ‘60s and now there was a pleasant mix of generations on either side of both versions of the gap, then and now and we all know it.   But, with all due respect to nuance, we choose to keep the simplicity of the “generational” label, the better to play Bookends, young on one side, not young on the other.

Here are the bookends:  Not coincidentally each “Gap” came and comes with its own version of Body Politic.  In the sixties it was the joyful opposition to joyless American Puritanism, free the body, celebrate the body.  The present opposition often takes this conceptual form:  that technology has superseded the need for the physical. Or to translate this fundamental redefinition of The Physical into the current lingua, “Seriously, Dude, do I have to actually be there?”

The “there” in question can be anywhere or anything: school, a job, a family event.  At the limit, human bodies are only really essential for anything freely chosen, maybe a “hook-up” or a party, that sort of thing.  Anything else in life, any other obligation can be nicely acquitted with some form of digital communication, the fewer characters (syllables are too long) the better.  The culture yearns for a picto-grammatical language.

Those are the Bookends, 1960s, Millennials, gaps and body talk.  In the 1960s there may have been the occasional aspiration to transcend the physical but these basic premises went unchallenged: that the student would do studenting in a school, with other physical people and that a worker would probably be working in a workplace with other physical people.  There was a rough consensus that the physical body was fully a part of one’s life, i.e. it got to come too.  In those years of “do not fold, spindle or bend” perforated computer mainframe cards, the idea that technology made a cleaner job of delivering deliverables was not widely held.  And the conjoining of comfort and technology, as in, not having to leave the chair or the screen, was a gleam in no one’s eye; not in 1960s Gapland.

In the next installment of today’s Labor Day Special Primary Source is virtually interested in how they go to work.

…Next:  Part II “Where’s There?” (click the link to this title)