The Landscape of Coworking Spaces: An Exploration Between Past and Future

As globalization is changing the way people live their daily lives, new technologies and knowledge workers are shaping a new economic system. This system is driven by a technology-empowered mobile workforce, whose needs are different from the traditional-office-related ones. In fact, knowledge workers can potentially work from anywhere in the world, as they just need a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection. The coworking movement formed around the need of a specifically-designed space for people who can work anywhere. Coworking spaces are an answer to social and work-related changes and they could be explained as a new style of work, combining the best elements of an office environment, its community, and access to its tools. The discipline of design keeps up with social, culture, local and global changes, so it’s interesting to investigate how design is involved in the coworking phenomenon. At the beginning of the phenomenon, only service and communication design were involved in the formula, but, as coworking has become mainstream, managers started to care about interior and furniture design too. This paper aims to make a mapping of the physical landscape of coworking spaces, also in relation to a brief evolutionary review of workspaces.