Working in Offices, Lobbies, Airports, Restaurants and Malls – Space Densification Takes Hold!

People often wonder when the concept of shared space really began. For me, it began in 1987 when our director of sales told our salespeople they were closing all branch offices and sending us home with a personal computer, 2,400 baud modem and a link to corporate – where our assistant would be shared among four of us. To say we were outraged would be an understatement. We lost our office, personal assistant and of course, our three-hour commute.

During this period, we also saw major corporations such as IBM and Deloitte trying to figure out what this new form of mobility – enabled by personal computers and laptops – meant to their workplace strategies. They began to experiment in major office complexes in cities such as Los Angeles. IBM sent many people home from their office on Hope Street and Deloitte introduced the concept of a shared desk in their South Bay office. In 1989, Regus was founded, and a new era of mobile employees began to reshape how and where we worked....