2022 BCO NextGen Ideas Project

Earlier this year, we challenged our NextGen members to put forward their boldest, most innovative and most creative ideas for the future workspace. Centring their focus on the requirements of the modern office, we asked for the most revolutionary ideas yet.

We received brilliant submissions from all who entered; the judging panel were incredibly impressed with the quality and the bold and creative ideas each participant had, and it was difficult for judges to pick out just six finalists.

Over the course of the last few months, our six finalists undertook state-of-the-art public speaking training from Ginger Leadership Communications. Each delivered a full 10-minute TED-style talk to a live audience on Thursday 29 September, flexing their newfound skills and sharing their thought-provoking ideas with the wider industry at Storey Club on Liverpool Street.

The group have been supporting each other throughout the public speaking programme, and will have been on quite the journey together. To avoid pitching them against each other, there was no overall winner — this was an evening to celebrate the achievements of our NextGen community. 

• Amelia Sweeney presented fascinating examples of rooms that could transport us elsewhere, challenging our sector to improve the Mothers’, Multifaith and Meditation facilities in current offices and on future projects by moving past static design solutions and integrating 'Digital Dens'.

• 'How can we redesign the office to optimize our energy, mood and productivity?' Jessica Spencer advocated for managing our energy better and suggested listening to your body and tracking your symptoms - finding out which part of the day makes you feel most drained and thinking about how you can put systems in place to alleviate this, such as doing a five-minute meditation after a difficult meeting.

• Never has screen time been so high. So how do we switch off? Have our offices adapted to the increased screen time and always-switched-on / always-connected-always-accessible-all-the-time way of life? Anoushka Pacquette called on the industry to take charge of workplace well-being, be bolder than just downloading a mindfulness app, and that we should be designating 'Digital Detox' centres in our future designs. Whether it's in new builds, refurbs or fit-outs, we have to adapt.

• Anna Tsoumi’s 'Puzzle_Piece' framework highlighted five fundamental areas, all interconnected, that offer a variety of settings for people to choose where and how they work. The five key pillars with suggested areas for the office were: Growth, Leisure, Community, Productive and Focus spaces. Anna concluded by saying that by creating a destination space where people want to come to collaborate and do more than just get work done, we’ll keep the office alive.

• ‘Transformational Workspaces of the Future’ was an idea birthed from playing Animal Crossing. Freya McGhee urged the sector to think about how to deliver more for clients, to think more creatively and more cost-efficiently via improvements to how we manage change. We could do this, Frey said, by immersing ourselves in the Metaverse and making use of blockchain technologies. Even if we think this is seemingly farfetched and expensive, Freya stressed that this could actually help the client stay within budget and combat inefficiency.

• Finally, Timothy Newcombe presented ‘The Power to reduce Power’ as a way of installing custom monitoring and alerting into the workplace. His system called ‘GEM’ or, graphical energy metering was inspired by addressing the climate emergency and reducing a building’s energy use. It would work by installing the electrical hardware to monitor the energy uses in the electrical infrastructure followed by one more step – installing the software onto your company computers, interfaces, phones and the like. The system would not only monitor usage but serve up fresh thinking and examples of exactly where usage could be reduced.

Where do you get your best ideas?

Event sponsors: Franchi, British Land, Storey, Multiplex, Parkeray, Gensler, Edge GB, Core 5 and Opera.

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