Coworking is Helping Shape the Future
January 6, 2008I came across a wide-ranging article about the coworking phenomenon on Corofolot’s Creative Seeds site today.The piece caught my interest because it addresses problems beyond the lack of office tools and distractions in coffee ships and that we independents face when making choices about where to work.
A temporary on-site cubicle, a cobbled-together home office, and a jovial but ultimately isolating coffee shop are the three most common options, and all of them lack the most important quality of the ideal creative workspace: other creative workers with whom to interact.
By the end of the article the author, who is obviously a proponent of group-work spaces, sees coworking spaces like Office Nomads and other as a one more cog in this new-style economy we’re all building and imagines coworking’s place in the evolutionary scale of work places. He calls it “a step on a continuum” and mentions groups who have formed coworking spaces organically such as Independents Hall in Philly and TENPOD in PDX.It’s amazing to me, now that I’m paying attention to it, how much we all think about where we work and how that space really affects the quality of our work (not to mention our enjoyment in doing it).
Tags: coroflot, spaces, the economy, workspace effect on creativity
January 7, 2008 at 7:29 am
I completely agree with the sentiments that you’re noticing. Seeing the effect that we’ve had on a community outside of the ones that visit our physical space, it’s clear that coworking spaces like ours are more of a stepping stone to a big picture of not *where* people want to work, but *how*.
I’ve been quoted saying something to the effect of, “every time I think about it that way, I totally freak myself out”.
January 11, 2008 at 10:40 am
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