A recent ‘Redesigning Work’ report produced by Portable suggests that while agile working models support a better work-life balance, they don’t necessarily create boundaries between life and work. Are we looking for better integration, or better balance? And what is the ultimate workplace model to support this?

It’ll be a long time before we can gain a wider perspective on the impacts, both good and bad, that these new working models have on our personal and professional lives. What we do know is that in the rapid evolution that is workplace design, typologies are simultaneously blending and diversifying to service a growing complexity of user needs. And Australian designers are firmly at the forefront of this workplace revolution.

Next Friday (February 2), Relative with Foolscap Studio is taking the conversation off the conference table and embedding it into MPavilion, where the two design entities will host Neo-Nomadic, a day-long coworking space and event. If you’re in the business of challenging (or experimenting with) the traditional notions of work and place, this might be the perfect day to do so.

There’ll be some toothy discussions over workplace futures, with Relative inviting select industry specialists – including our own Indesign Editor Alice Blackwood – to debate over topics like biophilic design, integrated technologies, and the blurring of design categories will transform the future ‘place of work’.

Entitled Outside Work: Places Beyond the Office, this interactive Q&A will introduce the concept of ‘third space’ environments, or ‘social spaces’; coworking spaces that are not so much defined by ‘office culture’, but the individuals who use them and the dynamic that arises from working alongside one another.

Invited speakers include Indesign Editor, Alice Blackwood, with fresh insights from Indesign’s soon-to-be-released WorkLife issue, on sale March 2018; digital practice leader at Aurecon Engineering and research academic in RMIT’s Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, Nick Williams; and OCULUS landscape architect and associate director or OCULUS Landscape Architecture + Urban Design, Claire Martin.

Join Relative at MPavilion on Friday 2 February at 2.30pm for this FREE hour-long talk.

mpavilion.org
relativeprojects.com