Companies that embrace this new work culture are trying to replicate the rich and varied environments of everyday life inside the office. Acres of desks and conference rooms are giving way to spaces that look like the rest of the world. New spaces support new behaviors, and they look like first and third places. Break rooms are evolving into cafe spaces. “Clubhouses” are replacing conference rooms. The hope is that these new spaces will engender more of the interactions we experience in life. Some firms have even gone so far as to design their offices along the lines of a small town complete with main streets and crossroads where people can meet. In doing so, they draw inspiration from the rest of life in the hopes of inspiring that same behavior.

The Power Of Familiarity

One of the primary things to change is the furniture. Metro, a forward-thinking company based just outside of San Francisco, is at the forefront of this movement. Its products regularly break conventional notions of office furniture, encouraging people to work in ways that are more comfortable, more welcoming and more productive. To do so, the company is drawing on the rich pantheon of spaces that exist in the rest of the world, and creating new work settings that bring the most vivid interaction spaces back into the office.

Some of the company’s first interpretations drew upon familiar home settings. The Highboy, for example, is inspired by the kind of counter that often separates the kitchen from the family room. Like its domestic counterpart, the Highboy encourages impromptu stand-up conversations. Detour lounge chairs create another familiar space, something akin to your living room. Just like a living room, Detour allows the kind of active but informal interactions that keep people connected.

It’s important to point out that the feat of creating a living room at work requires a lot more than having Ethan Allen ship to a different address. A modern workplace has unique demands that we can’t get away from, be it rigorous product testing or the need to accommodate the ever growing phalanx of high tech gear. The act of bringing life’s familiar places to work requires a discerning process of interpretation, adapting strong metaphors but tightening up the lines a bit so things fit in with the look and feel of an office.

One of the greatest examples of this is Bix. Metro’s new line of furniture might remind you of a diner that you once used to frequent. Perhaps it was the place that you went to late at night, to meet old friends when you were home from college. And perhaps you remember the booth that three or four of you piled into, to order endless cups of coffee and trade stories, hatch plans and share dreams. Those magical conversations are more than the stuff of nostalgia. They’re the kinds of interactions that companies are desperate for, the kinds that don’t seem to happen in a conventional conference room. More than just a lounge chair, Bix provides the building blocks for an entirely different sort of setting, one that’s familiar to most of us, and sorely needed at work.

No doubt, the movement to make work more comfortable and human-centered is not without its skeptics. It’ll probably be some time before enough such spaces exist to provide us with hard quantitative evidence of changed behavior. Nevertheless, our own experience may be a more powerful qualitative indicator. Products like Bix prove themselves in the stories that they elicit: the way our memories of past interactions combine with the experience of entirely new ones. When time spent reviewing a project with co-workers starts to feel more like good friends making plans and sharing stories, Bix has hit its mark.

Work is changing, and it’s becoming more like life. That’s a good thing for workers, and great thing for business. As the rest of life provides models for work, the places in life – those home places and third places – provide powerful models for companies like Metro. And by understanding what gives those places meaning, by skillfully interpreting those places for the office, the people at Metro are doing more than creating great spaces. They’re helping bring life to work.

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