Video: Scott at WorkTech 15—Exploring the future of work and the workplace

WorkTech is the international annual conference all about work, workplace, technology, and innovation.

At WorkTech 15 in New York last month, over 300 senior professionals from real estate, facilities, technology, executive management, architecture, and design gathered at conferences and master classes to debate and discuss the latest thinking about the future of where and how we work.

Pilot Projects founder and director Scott Francisco was asked to sit on an experts' panel discussion entitled "The Opensourced, Crowdsourced, Crowded Funded Workplace" along with leaders from Plastarc, WeWork, and Civic Hall. 

WorkTech recently posted a video of their conversation:

A screenshot from the conference video, with a Sandbox session projected in the background

Scott discusses the history of the Sandbox, Pilot Projects' signature participatory design and culture-building tool, and the complexities of designing where people work. "Few spaces are more complex," he says, "than the workplace, in terms of design problems."

He also elicits some enthusiasum and nervous laughter from the crowd when talking about that spurned foil to today's popular open-office concepts: walls.

"You'll see walls in all of our workplaces. Almost nothing is more contentious and important to people in the workplace than walls. And we like to have a lot of them, actually. The challenge is: how do you do them elegantly, and in a way that's actually flexible and provides privacy, but also visual openness?"

See the whole discussion here.

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Tags: sandbox, nyc, workspace design, participatory design, innovation