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1.0 What can education learn
from the corporate world?

Figure 1.1 I’ve had the great privilege at DEGW to be at the forefront of
Paradigms of space ownership thinking about the workplace and about how people are using
space and technology in different ways. This evening I will be
bringing together ideas from some of our recent projects for
both the corporate and educational sectors in order to project
into the future and, hopefully, build a sense of what the learning
environments of the future could be like. I’ll be looking at primary
and secondary schools, further and higher education and also
Core space at provision for life-long learning.
But I’ll begin in the workplace where all the rules about how we
Icon and image space
use physical space are changing. There are fundamental shifts in
Long lease/freehold
how people are working, where they are working and when they
Prime location
are working. The kinds of questions being asked are ‘what is an
Highly serviced
organisation?’, ‘what is a company?’ and ‘who do we work for?’
– questions that have physical implications on working processes
and, in turn, the workspace.
The very notion of the organisation has changed; when we talk to
clients about their organisations and who works for them, we find
that many are now better defined as networks than finite bodies.
Flexi space Increasingly, organisations consist of a mixture of core staff,
freelance staff and partners forming ever more fluid knowledge-
Shorter leases
sharing networks – a shift that has led DEGW to think about how
Administrative or sales space
we can procure space for our clients in different, more responsive
Conference/training space
ways. We use this simple communication tool to help organisations
begin to think in alternative ways about the space they own and
occupy Figure 1.1.
What we’re seeing in the corporate world is a reduction in the
amount of core space, a decline in the iconic value of long-leased
space, and a transition towards a richer range of spaces. Space
Pay-as-you-go space remains a commodity, but one that you move in and out of in a
much more flexible way. An interesting trend is towards what we
Licensed or pay for use
call ‘pay-as-you-go space’ where you pay for the time that you
Shared/borrowed from partners
occupy space (serviced offices are one example). But we believe a
much more richly featured workplace can be explored by spanning
perceptions of both physical and virtual space. The virtual world is
increasingly essential to working processes (think about instant

3 What can education learn from the corporate world?