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By Lauren Bielski
Never mind the office of the future. The city of the future is here today. Cisco's new, large-scale exhibit shows what could be done differently — and more efficiently — based on today's technologies.
In Incheon, Korea's third-largest city and the first to be designated by the central government as a Free Economic Zone, the network powerhouse is demonstrating its Smart+Connected vision for all tomorrow's cities. The 80-day exhibit, known as the Incheon Global Fair and Festival, will continue into October and features a variety of conferences and events.
As part of Cisco's comprehensive display, self-managing systems will control their own energy consumption — called EnergyWise. Interiors will also feature more familiar collaborative technologies, such as videoconferencing — albeit vastly improved in terms of user interface — to make it easier for knowledge workers to convene, share insights, and make key project decisions without being in the same room.
The solutions being featured include Cisco Virtual Information Desk, which can let a remote receptionist greet visiting customers from multiple locations, and a building control center system that, among other tasks supported, lets users access services such as the ability to make meeting room reservations from their IP phones. It also handles functions like control of building security.
Smart+Connected is a recent example of an enduring phenomenon — showcasing a mix of emerging and current technologies and attempting to predict how office work will change in lockstep with larger societal shifts.
In 2001, an exhibit in Denver called Office 2010 showed off new concepts in office design, as well as then emerging ideas about collaborative computing. A recent chat with one of the exhibit planners, AnneMarie Dienstbach, principal with RNL Design's Denver office, revealed that the show turned some heads at the time, although the recession and mindset that followed 9/11 brought it to a premature close.
In light of the current recession, notes Dienstbach, who heads up the interior design studio for RNL, there is some interest among her client base in ways of using workspace differently, most notably designing floorplans that can cope with rapid shifts in workforce and "easily moving bodies around without too much disruption." The "old school" idea of being attached to a particular corner office may go the way of the vinyl record, 8 track, (and increasingly, CD): something rare, perhaps collected by a few, but unknown to the masses in an increasingly digital, movable work world.
But for all this easy transformation to occur, the offices themselves have to support a "pick up and go" work style. In a series of essays from Cisco called "Connected Real Estate," the concept of the intelligent building was defined as one in which "the building fabric, space, services and information systems can respond in an efficient manner to the initial and changing demands of the owner, occupier, and environment." Like the idea of "self-healing" smart data centers floated a few years ago, the space-age and somewhat ethereal idea of the intelligent building has been around for a while (at least the 1970s, according to Cisco), waiting for the actual systems that could support them to catch up.
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