Thanks to everyone who agreed to talk in front of the cameras. And a huge thanks to Mojo Solo (also members), who artfully  edited and stitched the video together.

Did you know that Steelcase owns the industrial design consultancy IDEO? Well, neither did we until recently. And as it turns out, IDEO’s human-centered design process has had quite effect, not only on Steelcase’s product line, but its prognosis for the future of work, a future in which cubicles and corner will give way to open, flexible floor plans where workers can work, meet and socialize freely. This is being driven by pressure to reduce real estate costs (the 2nd largest cost for most organizations, after payroll) as well as increased mobility among workers, thanks to laptops, mobile phones and even increased acceptance of telecommuting.

What does it all mean? That someday most corporate offices will look like coworking spaces! Only, from what we saw on our field trip, the work environments and collaborative technologies that Steelcase has developed are light years ahead of the humble Ikea sticks we’ve been able to assemble at CoCo.

Below are some highlights from our trip, in which we visited Workspring, a collaborative offsite meeting center in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, followed by Steelcase University and Steelcase headquarters, both in Grand Rapids Michigan. Enjoy!

Workspring

Entrance.

Meeting space with a media:scape unit, which allows meeting participants to share one or more laptop screens.

Meeting room with a double media:scape setting. Notably, this table has an unusual bowed shape that ensures good peer-to-peer communication as well as screen visibility.

The hallways at Workspring are designed with seating/standing areas that allow meeting participants to have ad-hoc conversations, which research shows is just as important to the collaborative process as the meeting itself.

More casual seating areas in the hallways.

The view from Workspring. A private courtyard? This is a rare setting in Chicago’s Loop!

Steelcase University and headquarters

Steelcase University is a former manufacturing plant that is now a training center for the company’s employees, customers and dealers. Just as importantly, the university serves as a living laboratory, where Steelcase can try out new work and meeting settings using its product lines and prototypes.

First, a note on the lost art of hospitality…

Coming to Steelcase University, we didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps we’d get to look around, sit on some furniture…who knows. But to our astonishment, the whole day had been thoroughly planned out, including chef-catered meals and a meeting with the company’s SVP in charge of new ventures.

They even took the time to put our website up on the big screen!

This was the dining room where we were served a killer two-course breakfast. The chef was personally on hand to tell us what he had prepared.

Debra Shrontz, a 30-plus-year Steelcase veteran, was our guide for the entire day. She personally made sure that we had a great experience.

The first course included steel-cut oatmeal with cranberries. At about this time, we had to ask: had Steelcase mistaken us for a couple of Fortune-100 procurement managers with multimillion-dollar budgets? Nope. They hadn’t. This is just how Steelcase treats visitors: by attending to all the details that add up to a great experience.

After breakfast, we progressed through different areas at Steelcase University and the nearby headquarters.

Diner-booth-like seating is a common sight at Steelcase. The high seat backs help enclose the space and make the setting less like a lounge and more like a workspace.

Same story in the company’s executive suite, where a large kitchen/coffee area provides ample room for impromptu information exchange and casual meetings.

Another type of furniture system we saw is called “Post and Beam.” As the name implies, it’s a series of posts with crossbeams that together help define areas, which can then be used or formal or casual meeting spaces, work enclaves or whatever. In the picture above, you can see two meeting areas. To the left, a perforated curtain serves as a visual “wall” that provides a subtle sense of privacy.

Another Post and Beam setting.

Partway through the day, we were lucky enough to talk to Frank Graziano, who, as the head of Steelcase’s Futures group, is the company’s resident futurist. He sought us out in a far corner of the building, where we proceeded to have an hour-long chalk talk about collaborative work trends, social networks and lots more!

Finally, we toured one of Steelcase’s office buildings where they were in the midst of performing an experiment on themselves. This looks like a coffee lounge, but it’s actually a mobile work area that once held cubicles for some 70 employees. Now, the same number of workers use these and other seating areas to work on their laptops, drink coffee, socialize and have meetings. Sound familiar? See, like I said earlier, eventually everyone will work in a coworking space!

Another view of the same space. Note the countertop in the background, which was full-up with focused workers typing away on their laptops.

So, all in all, a pretty inspiring trip. While we don’t have corporate offices, we learned a number of lessons that are applicable to our own collaborative space, including the importance of hospitality and customer experience. What’s more, before going, we were pretty firm in the opinion that the people side (community, networking, etc.) of the equation was far more important than environmental factors, such as decor or furniture. Now, I’d say that we’re looking at both sides as equally important.

Finally, a huge thanks to the folks at Steelcase, including Darren Shavor, Debra Shrontz, John Malnor and Frank Graziano for their tremendous hospitality. And last, but not least, thanks to Kris Hansen of Target Commercial Interiors for having made the initial introduction!

But as it turns out, we might not have been too far off the mark. Within the next week, we’ll have a corporate department actually take up residence with us for a couple months while their office digs get shuffled around. Meanwhile, another major corporation in town has asked us about conducting offsites and coworking – apparently in hopes of getting a boost of creativity and insights into our work culture. So, perhaps there are some cubicle dwellers who see benefits in getting out of the office.

But what about the many corporate workers who don‘t work in cubicles? Telecommuters? Sales reps? ROWE workers? A USA Today article about coworking suggests that the benefits of coworking – namely working with adults – might hold some promise for corporate nomads as well:

A new study of 3,600 telecommuters commissioned by Microsoft revealed their No. 1 complaint was lack of face-to-face interaction.

So, tell us please: If you are a corporate denizen or a telecommuter, do you see value in occasionally taking the team in a different environment (different than a hotel ballroom, for example) for ideation, problem solving or other creative meetings?  Or for individual employees to occasionally work offsite? How useful would it be to make connections with other smart people from outside your organization? Honestly, we’d love to hear from you – particularly about what ideas you have for bringing coworking and the cubicle closer together.

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We would also appreciate any feedback on some of the new services we’re thinking of offering:

• Team coworking – where a department, workgroup or project team could visit CoCo for meetings and collaborative work sessions. These meetings could be facilitated (we know a few good facilitators of various stripes!) or not.
• Corporate daycamps -  an invitation-only event* that includes breakfast, a morning lecture/discussion on a hot topic, followed by a day of coworking (and very likely some good conversation and cross-pollination.)
• Private offsites – like the above, an organization could have its own daycamp, in which we would provide breakfast, a lecture/discussion and an afternoon of coworking in a private room, or in our open areas.
• Speaker’s Bureau – we’ve already had some great speakers at CoCo. The topics they’ve covered include social media, IP law, blogging, marketing strategy and GTD, to name a few. We want to formalize this somewhat by creating a stable of speakers in different domains, who are available to speak authoritatively to visiting corporate groups.**

* Why invite-only? One of the issues we anticipate is that corporate employees might have trouble (or perceive too great a risk) mixing it up with the competition. So, our idea would be to invite employees from like departments at non-competing companies (e.g., Target, UHC, 3M and Ameriprise).

**If you are an expert in your domain and would like to be part of our Speaker’s Bureau, please contact us. Our goal would be to have a short list of 10-15 experts who are visible and credible and would bring value to our guests. (In case you’re wondering, yes, it would be a paying gig.)

Why cowork?
At its most basic, coworking is an antidote to isolation and cabin fever. When you have a community of people who are also trying to achieve their dreams, you realize that you’re not alone. But it’s also a whole lot more:

• A way to make a tangible commitment to your freelance or consulting career
• A way of networking effortlessly
• An easy way to hunt or potential clients, collaborators.
• A great way to make new friends.

What kind of people cowork?
We’re constantly surprised by who shows up for coworking:

• Marketing consultants
• Freelance writers and designers
• Web and mobile developers
• Videographers
• Entrepreneurs
• Actors
• Musicians

What happens on a typical day?
First priority at any coworking space is to get the coffee brewing and put on some music (not too loud, mind you). Over the course of the morning, people begin to filter in. Some coworkers invite their clients to visit for a meeting in one of our conference rooms. Around noontime, some folks use our kitchen to warm up leftovers. Others like to band together and seek out their lunch on the streets. By afternoon, we’ve got a healthy buzz going of keyboard clicks and conversations. At the end of the day, it’s time to head home or to any one of the local pubs for Happy Hour.

Extra credit:

Learn more some recent articles:

• Wall Street Journal: Office (and Beanbag) Sharing Among Strangers
• New York Times: They’re Working on Their Own, Just Side by Side

Photo credit: langalex

So, we’re pleased to announce that CoCo is coming to Minneapolis!

We hope to be up and running with our 2nd location as early as March and probably no later than April. The question is where? We’ve already asked a few people, but now we want to put it to a larger vote.

If you could pick one place on the West side to locate the next CoCo, where would it be? We’ve listed some possible locations below. If you consider yourself a potential coworker (whether on an occasional or frequent basis) please tell us the one location that you’d be most likely to visit in the future.

Thank you! Your answer will help us sort through the many possibilities and zero in on a neighborhood that will work for the greatest number of people.

A couple of quick notes:

• For CoCo West, we will offer the same services available in St. Paul: Drop-in coworking, permanent office space and conference rooms.
• We didn’t put downtown Minneapolis on the list because we’ve learned over the past couple months that accessibility is huge for most people. So, for CoCo West, we’ll be looking for a location that has abundant and free parking, which will make going to coworking truly as easy as going to the coffee shop.

On Friday (2.5.10) an amazing group of freelancers met at CoCo to discuss what problems keep them awake at night. This is the second in a series of meetings that we will host here at CoCo in the effort to build broader collaboration amongst freelancers across disciplines. These sessions will be followed by an educational series for freelancers to help them solve and work together on making their individual businesses more effective, and at the same time expand their role in the broader community.

The first session had the following all-star cast:

• Deborah Vajda, writer
• Jenn Barnett, photographer
• Betsy Kershaw, marketing diva
• Janis Olson, writer
• Ketan Kakkad, founder of TheSmallWorld & co-owner of CurryUp
• Arun Batchu, programmer & owner of CurryUp
• Valerie Rigsbee, web designer & Broadway expert

In addition to great conversation and ideation, we enjoyed phenomenal curry food from CurryUp and Eric TremperTremble at Comfy Chair Consulting. You definitely do not want to miss any future curry potlucks – after all you only live once!

During our discussion, the group identified the following top issues:

1. Finding first users for a new product or service
2. How to sell
3. Connecting, and staying connected, with other freelancers
4. How to serve multiple businesses during the startup mode (wearing two or more hats)
5. Finding enough time to do all that needs to be done
6. Finding work
7. Networking
8. How to make your passion a business, and make money at it
9. Balancing family and work- creating realistic boundaries
10. How to attract larger projects – balancing the project portfolio with small & large projects
11. Finding time to actually do the work that has been sold
12. Protecting Intellectual Property (IP)
13. Promotion of services
14. Pricing of services – balancing value & price
15. Having enough money to invest into equipment or needing equipment before the money is there

I think all freelancers can relate to one or more of the issues listed above. At times the isolation of being a freelancer can cause doubt, fear, and loneliness. At the same time, everyone in the group said they are doing doing the work they’ve always wanted.

At the end of the event, we are all a little wiser. We also experienced what can happen when diverse backgrounds join in a conversation sharing concerns and ideas in an open collaborative environment. Friends are made, ventures are born, and value is created!

During our conversation Arun Batchu recommended the book “The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything”. Arun inspired each of us with his holistic view of contribution.

We are looking forward to future discussions, and a series where freelancers can collectively build on the wisdom of the crowd along with some guidance of individuals how have been there and done that…. Stay tuned!

More pics here

We’ve also cut the cost of our day rate to $30.

• Buy a coworking pass

• See our plans & pricing

Creative Commons photo by Stewf

Read “Coworking at CoCo” at the Merge blog.

Thanks for the kind words, Doug, as well as the opportunity to tell folks about CoCo!