Organisational scientist Bernadette Nooij noticed that more and more universities and universities of applied sciences are adopting activity-based workspaces (ABW), despite limited knowledge about their impact on teaching and the people who work there.
Activity-based workspaces
“ABW originates from the corporate world and is implemented to save space and promote collaboration. But in an educational setting, other questions arise – such as how to preserve privacy, tranquillity, collegiality, and good contact with students,” Nooij explains.
Major gap
Nooij decided to study how management-imposed workspaces affect the daily work and experiences of lecturers. “The results show a major gap between the appealing promises of ABW and everyday reality,” she says. “While plans often speak of efficiency, flexibility, and collaboration, lecturers report problems with concentration, privacy, and maintaining contact with colleagues or students. And the promised freedom often comes with numerous rules and unwritten expectations, which lead to control and tension.”
Frustration and dissatisfaction
“Whether people are satisfied strongly depends on whether their expectations are met,” Nooij continues. “When expectations aren’t fulfilled, lecturers experience frustration and dissatisfaction. My main conclusion, therefore, is that introducing a new office concept only works if users are genuinely involved, their working practices are taken seriously, and success is not measured solely in square metres or cost, but above all in how well the workspace supports education.”
Be cautious
Nooij advises educational institutions and designers to be cautious about blindly adopting office concepts from the business world. For administrators, this means success is not just about saving money, but primarily about whether lecturers can do their jobs properly. For designers, it means looking beyond the idea of ‘beautiful spaces’ and truly engaging in dialogue with users.
Engaging in dialogue
Nooij is a strong advocate of co-design. “Institutions work together with lecturers and students to analyse how a workspace should function. This helps prevent disappointment and resistance, and increases the chance that people will feel a sense of ownership over the new environment. This matters to society as well, because the workspace influences the quality of teaching and research.”
At-home ethnography
For her research, Nooij used at-home ethnography. “This is a form of fieldwork in which I closely and over a longer period studied my own working environment. I examined how lecturers, staff, and students used the new workspaces, what rules were in place, and how people responded to them.”
She also explored the narratives used by accommodation professionals and managers to legitimise the new workspaces. “I observed meetings, took notes on informal conversations, and tracked how spaces were experienced over time. Academic literature and policy texts helped me place these experiences in a broader context. This allowed me to show how tension can arise between the ideas behind a new workspace and how it is actually experienced in practice.”