Living Office Lab

The organisation of office buildings is shifting from assigned workspaces to flexible work environments. Flexible offices enable increased efficiency of space and energy use, support work mobility, and allow diversification of workspace facilities that individuals and groups can choose in order to accommodate their personal or task-specific needs and preferences. However, within this context there is an inherent challenge. On the one hand, office spaces need to be flexible in use. On the other hand, there is the human need to be attached to a space and to personalize it. The goal of the “Living Office Design Lab” is to holistically design, develop and study “Living Offices” as a new form of flexible office environments that can be continuously personalised and adapted by their users. In this context, the Internet of Things can serve as an enabler for interconnecting different products and services constituting a Living Office and for engaging its users in interaction with these products and services. Within this area, issues related to social engagement, collaborative work, physiological and psychological health, participatory sensing and business management play important roles and can be subject to separate graduation or research projects performed within the lab. The lab's research leverages research through design, living lab research, mixed research methods, agile prototyping approaches, as well as involvement of office users as co-researchers and co-designers, in order to exploratively develop and validate new solutions for flexible office environments.