Last Monday in Sydney I attend a really interesting panel about The Future of Work: Coworking and Collaboration». It was hosted by Hub Sydney at Oxford St Design Store.

The event focused on the future of work and how the definition of work is rooted in the work place and the organisation behind. The panel, composed of architects, designers and community managers, also discussed how the de-materialisation of work place leads to new ways of working together.

Today, there are different ways we can now work free from our traditional office buildings.

So what will be the future of work, you may wonder?

Firstly, it means stop doing all the work by yourself. In the future, it will be considered as stupid to start your project from scratch as most of the information you need will be available. The idea is to do a by yourself with the help of others, based on the mantra of take and give, i.e. collaboration. Yammer is a perfect example of an enterprise social network service dedicated to facilitate knowledge exchange, file sharing and company collaboration.

Secondly, it means work is based on functional needs. Rather than having a fixed number of employees, there will be more and more of virtual employees, self-employees and consultants.

Josh Capelin created a coworking space in Surry Hills, Home/Work, open to these business nomads or virtual employees. This is not a lonely initiative. The rise of coworking spaces in Sydney highlights the evolution of working: the development of services and entrepreneurship mixed with the notion of sharing: sharing space,  sharing ideas and… coffees!

Besides how many of us grumble everyday about the too many hours spent/lost in the commute? With the development of virtual employees, it’s the flexibility of working hours that expands.

What about the corporate world?

The corporate world is changing with a slow disappearance of fixed desks. Architect and design firms have always been ahead of their time: in the 70s architects started thinking of places where computers will be in houses, long before the first Mac.

Today, architecture and design firms think in terms of how facilitate what people really need to make their business work. Tenants who look for hiring offices need flexibility: it’s more about changing and moving spaces than moving or changing furniture.

Traditional work places are behind the way most of us are working now but large corporate places have started to evolve.

Second Road, for example, provides strategies and implements design solution for companies that suffer from obsolete organisational model. Second Road brings tools to make people apt to work together again, exploring new ways of collaboration.

“Environment does shape how people act. So shaping work environment does shape how people work” explained Alexis Baum, experience architect at Second Road.

I’m really looking forward to the future of work: such inspiring ideas and experiments are already taking place so the future promises to be exciting!

About our ambassador // Delphine Vuagnoux is a community ambassador for Sydney. She is passionate about innovation and social change and a communications manager at All Together Now. You can find her on Twitter here: @delphinevuagnou.