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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?
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