If you have a treadmill desk, you should not have a treadmill desk. It is ridiculous. But there’s no doubt that the traditional office space as a personalized bunker has changed, whether you’re working on an unfinished door propped up by two filing cabinets, something resembling a spaceship or no desk at all. From Shane Hickey at the Guardian:

“This move away from the office desk as the main place of productivity is one of the developments in workplace design which has seen the real estate departments of large corporations realise that packing employees tightly into spaces will not necessarily result in greater productivity, according to Philip Tidd from the design and architecture firm Gensler.

‘The idea that the desk is a unit of productivity is changing very, very rapidly. Your productivity is not measured by the amount of time you sit behind a thing called a desk. It is what you do. It is about your output,’ he said. ‘It is about getting the balance of specs right so it is not just get everybody in the open, have open plan but have the right balance of spaces where you can get in a zone of concentration.’

This requirement for varied features in office buildings is cemented by the longer hours of many workers, notably in the technology sector, and as a result new offices are now seen to need different areas for working and letting off steam, a tactic most notably championed by Google.

The new White Collar Factory, which is to open beside east London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ and designed by AHMM, will have a running track for the companies that take up space there.”