Interior design assistant professor offers expertise on trends influencing today’s office space design

Anna Ruth Gatlin, an assistant professor of interior design in Auburn’s College of Human Sciences, offered her thoughts on the changing world of office design. In 2014, she utilized her expertise to assist interior design faculty and industry partners in transforming interior design faculty offices into “working labs.” Each space contained various types of furniture and carpet to enhance students’ education. Their work earned second place from the Association of University Interior Designers National Design Competition. Gatlin served as a designer for Facilities Management at Auburn for six years, while lecturing in the college. She was part of a design team that won the Best Institutional Design award for their work on the Mell Classroom Building at Auburn. Gatlin is a three-time Auburn alumna with LEED AP certification.

One trend in office/workspace design is making offices more comfortable to encourage employees to work longer. Whether it’s to inspire creativity or increase productivity, how do you address this design evolution?

A key to addressing making offices both more efficient and more comfortable is flexibility. If an office is designed to be flexible, then furniture and fixtures can be easily moved or reconfigured to meet the needs at the moment—whether it’s converting a conference room into breakout space for small teams, having the ability to retreat to a quiet space away from a busy working zone or planning for long-term changes like shifting teams and team spaces for different projects down the road, if a space is designed to be flexible it can meet the needs of the specific company and company culture.

Retaining top employees is another reason workspace design is transitioning from the world of one-size-fits-all cubicles to designing spaces that allow employees to have choices about where they work. They might want to meet with a small team in the morning, work in the café in the afternoon and seek an out of the way lounge-style spot to work quietly the next morning. Because so much can be done from places outside of the traditional desk, it’s key to design for employee choice and flexibility.  

Another trend is offices with remote employees. As the number of employees working from home increases, how do you design a space when a significant portion of your workforce uses it rarely or not at all?

There’s a trend that’s not quite so new now, but it’s becoming more popular. It’s called “hoteling,” and it basically means that no one has an assigned desk—you just find a place to work in the office that suits what you need to do that day. That means that there is little dedicated real estate to people who rarely come in the office, but it allows all employees to have a spot when they do come in. Again, creating a space that’s flexible and the appropriate size is a key factor. Hoteling allows you to reduce your real estate footprint without making remote employees who come into the office once or twice a week to feel like they’re “outsiders.”

Does technology play a role in these design trends or does it just depend on the client?

Technology is a huge factor when it comes to designing office space, whether it’s for a company where all employees report to the office at 8 a.m. or most of them remote-in. More meetings are happening virtually, at least in part, so spaces have to be designed to accommodate that. The laptop allows employees to work anywhere in the office—perched at the coffee bar in the breakroom, in a comfy lounge seat with a great view, with a team in a meeting room or at a desk. Providing appropriate design solutions that allow for future flexibility as technology evolves and changes is a major job that the designer undertakes.

How do you educate Auburn interior design students on office/workplace design? The future of office/workplace design?

I teach the commercial (office) design studio, and we just began partnering with Allsteel, one of the major commercial furniture manufacturers, and Interior Elements, a local commercial furniture dealership, to work through real-life challenges and learn about design trends in office design. Allsteel has an incredible design and research team, and their National Architecture and Design Manager, who is also their Universal Design expert, flew down to Auburn to work with my class a few times. She also came to our final presentations to see how the students incorporated what they learned over the semester.

How do trends such as a standing desk, which many implement at work for better posture, influence the overall design of an office/work space?

Being able to change your posture—from sitting to standing, or moving from one location to another—has been proven to be better for you than sitting all day. But be aware—standing all day is just as bad as sitting all day! The key is changing your posture, about every hour or so. A key to successful implementation of sit-to-stand options such as a standing desk, is to make it easy to use, and to ensure that the employee doesn’t feel awkward when they stand. If it’s an open-office situation, and everyone’s workstations are hip-height, and I decide to stand to work, I stick out like a sore thumb. Designing different levels within the space—whether it’s incorporating a green wall of plants, sprinkling in standing height meeting tables or integrating different types of workspaces such as meeting rooms, café tables, lounge seating and breakout space—can help an employee not feel like a gopher in a field when they chose to change their posture. Good design normalizes it, and makes it easy for people to change how they work.