Oct 13 2008
Re: Work Together. Build the Bar.
This post is a response to Work Together, Build the Bar, posted on Florida Creatives by Ryan Price.
Coworking is happening now. The coworking movement in Orlando has essentially been self-organizing and remains dependent upon a community of independent, creative, and enterprising individuals. A coworking space is just a space. Its primary selling point is that it has the potential to be ‘owned’ by a group of creative, independent people who can use it as they see best. It offers a highly visible, neutral ground for people of different industries to meet and collaborate, and it has the potential to increase the visibility of the freelancing population in general. But the people occupying the space are the true assets that give a space its character, appeal, and, ultimately, its marketability.
A coworking space must be well-designed in order for it to achieve its full potential. Like any other endeavor, the design of a given project will strongly influence what and with what efficiency tasks can be accomplished. In the case of coworking, both the physical design and the organizational design need to be strongly considered. Despite the unplanned, spontaneous nature of the activities within the space - or perhaps because of it - the space must be organized so that it can be very flexible and very agile in its operations. Whoever is running the space (making sure that there is paper for the copier and that six groups aren’t trying to use the conference room at the same time) needs to be able to work with the community to proactively make things happen.
To go back to the bar metaphor: a bar is designed as a gathering place for people to relax and talk, to share ideas and experiences. A bar can be a neat place, but a bar designed as a pool hall and a bar designed as an Irish pub and a bar designed as a indie joint are going to function very differently and attract very different people. If you don’t try to design certain principles into the build-out and expect to add those things in later, you may run into some problems. (i.e. Where do we put these pool tables?) And, no matter how cool the setup is, if the guy behind the counter is a miser and accuses you of stealing or, conversely, if he allows anything and everything to happen within his operation, the bar could very easily become unfun or unsafe.
This all to say: a bar is built for people, for gathering, for specific activities to take place. In these things, it is very much like a coworking space. If we forget the people we cater to, we’ve lost the big picture; as we all know, a bar loses its draw if there are no cool people available to spark interesting conversations and make things happen. After all, that was the whole point of building a bar in the first place.