James Calder was named an Indesign Luminary way back in Issue 50, has been a member of the INDE.Awards’ jury from the conception of the program and continues as a juror in 2025. His lists of achievements is prodigious, as a practitioner, facilitator, author and part-time educator, interested in all facets of the strategy, design and use of the workplace, learning and health environment. He is based in Australia but works globally with a stellar list of clients and is at the coalface of workplace design investigating and implementing new ways of working.

Here he writes about his new practice, Placing, that explores workplace design today and for the future.

James Calder: As a workplace innovator for three decades, I have never been more optimistic about the future of the workplace and the emerging and expanding role for designers.

The workplace evolves and is disrupted constantly, but the new change coming with the Spatial Web and AI is perhaps the biggest change humanity has seen.  The current 2D Web is dominated by Big Tech but as we add 5G, sensors, and AI, we move into realm of human experience in the 3D world.  In my view, it is highly unlikely that the old innovators will be the future innovators, and I hope that the people that understand this new realm and the endless possibilities best will be the next generation of architects, interior designers, anthropologists and behavioural scientists.

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My colleagues and I at DEGW were the original strategists and implementors of Activity Based Working (ABW), with our first ABW projects in Europe in 1995 and eventually in Australia in the award-winning project, ANZ at 100 Queen Street, Melbourne in 2001. 

What started the idea was observation studies that showed something weird was happening – people were spending less time at their desks.  The design response was to create a range of activity settings for the ideal space for the task at hand, using the new Wi-Fi and mobile device technologies.

My research is now showing a new set of data around users and space use – as a client recently said, “Something just feels off in our workspace”.  The old model of leased office space as an organisational ‘container’ may no longer be productively working and a new model is required – what I call the ‘Spatial Economy’. 

Disruption is rarely welcomed, and ABW took a long time to be accepted and may already be an outdated concept for many organisations.  Similarly, the Spatial Economy is just beginning and challenges many of our notions around space ownership, design and leasing. 

My new advisory practice, Placing, is working with a range of innovative organisations and landlords to reimagine space use around the idea of ‘physical rights management’ to create a dynamic rather than static way of using space.  The new technology required is now available, just as WI-FI in the early 2000s quickly created a new workplace model.

My partners and I believe the next evolution of space use is dynamic, digitally integrated and highly utilised and we have created a new boutique and independent advisory firm specifically to work in this space, with a unique set of skills around future workplace, digital experience and the Spatial Economy.  We call the practice ‘Placing’ and we are certainly placed at the forefront of change and are excited by the possibilities.

Placing
placing.world

Photography
Courtesy James Calder and Placing