The Ark Workspace

A new kind of office

When Assaí outgrew its Glebe office in 2000, we moved to a beautiful heritage building in the city, York House, between King Street and the Queen Victoria Building.

The building has high ceilings, and good daylight from large windows to both front and back of the building. It has a modern marble foyer, two new Kone lifts with access key system, new twin dual-zone air-conditioning units on each office floor, and Louis Poulsen luminaires. Unlike most refurbishments of older office buildings, which install suspended ceilings which crop the tops of windows and hide the structure of the building, the York Street refurbishment has computer floors instead of ceilings. This means that the full shape of the window is visible; the original timber beams are visible; the window sill heights are low, resulting in great views out even when seated.

We secured a whole floor, far more space than we needed. This was for two reasons - to give Assaí room to grow, and an opportunity to experiment with a new idea for shared office space.

During the last five years, Assaí has been developing, through both research and practice, a body of knowledge on how an office needs to be designed and operated in order to fully support knowledge work today.

The Ark Workspace is a new kind of office, created for small firms and individual consultants. Unlike conventional serviced offices, this new model supports a community of knowledge and personal support. Unlike the shared studios of artists and designers, this model offers advanced technology, spatial design, and furnishings in a superb building in a top location with people from a variety of backgrounds, rather than from a shared background.

Our criteria for membership of this community is:

• convivial people with a wide range of interests
• doing knowledge-intensive work
• non-competing and complementary with others in the mix

We envision a community of professionals who learn from each other over coffee, in the halls, in the library or lounge...possibly though not necessarily on joint projects, through weekly seminars, through a knowledge-base run on an intranet…a kind of university of the commercial world. We see this as not only an office, but an intellectual and emotional home for small firms and freelance workers without the time or the resources to set up just the right place for themselves.

The facilities - More than a serviced office

• Ours is an open office. You get access to all 400 m2. In a conventional serviced office, you are confined to your 10 m2 - this includes meeting rooms, lounge areas, storage and the kitchen

• The technology is extensive, and networked

• Flexibility is inherent, it's easy to add an extra person, it's simply a matter of renting an additional workstation.

• Reception- A large meeting table, for quick meetings with suppliers without bringing them into the rest of the office. Visitors are met by the full-time receptionist, and then escorted to meeting rooms. No one from outside the knowledge community can wander around unattended.

• The Big Room - A large meeting room, with a smart whiteboard capable of displaying computer images (with a capturing and saving capability). Electronic files from the whiteboard can be printed, processed and/or e-mailed.

• The Alcove - A medium size meeting room suitable for as many as eight people, comfortable stools at a high table.

• Small Meeting Room - Small meeting room suitable for as many as four people

• The Lounge - Big comfortable couches near a big window with a view.

Technology

• digital PABX with cordless handsets, which allows free roaming around the office. All calls pass through reception (unless otherwise desired)
• all workstations have access to an A3 and A4 laserprinters, an A4 colour printer.
• central e-mail server with a high-speed connection to the internet
• flatbed scanning and CD-ROM burning

The needs of the knowledge-worker

All of us who have started in home offices know that it entails a certain degree of isolation. Not only do we work alone, or at best in a group of two or three, but homes tend to be located away from where the action is. It's easy to get out of touch with the hub of the business world.

Getting out of touch costs money. Professionals are knowledge-workers, paid for applying what they know. If you're not learning, you're not developing. Robert Reich, in The Work of Nations, talks about the important function that city centres have in driving the knowledge economy by bringing what he calls 'symbolic analysts' together to talk to each other, to learn from each other. Both Dorothy Leonard-Barton (in Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation) , and Peter Drucker (in Post-Capitalist Society) point to the importance of 'T-shaped' skills: depth of knowledge in one field, coupled with a breadth of knowledge across many fields. This breadth is important to allow professionals to work together in multi-disciplinary fields. Acquiring that breadth means working in the company of others.

So we believe it is critical that knowledge-workers, just to maintain their edge, rub shoulders with knowledge-workers from other disciplines on a daily basis. But there's another, more positive reason why the home office cannot be the engine room of the knowledge economy. Innovation, and original insights into problems, do not come from lone thinkers pondering in isolation, but from the 'creative abrasion' and 'displacement of concepts' that comes about when different world-views collide. Innovation comes from difference.

So in our concept of the ideal knowledge office, conditions are right for each person to have the chance to encounter views and knowledge radically different from his or her own. Out of this comes the possibility of both learning and innovation.

Central to our concept of the office of the future is therefore a community of knowledge, a community of learning.

Interested in space at The Ark? Get a FREE Information Pack by visiting The Ark's own web page.