Kate Wendt
Title: Associate Principal/Director of Interiors, Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Cambridge
Age: 63
Experience: 35 years
Kate Wendt grew up in Chicago, where the Windy City’s distinctive skyscrapers inspired her interest in contemporary architecture. After college she worked as a clinical dietician for three years before returning to school to pursue her degree at Harrington College of Design. As a principal at Garcia Architecture in Kansas City, she helped design the 3.9-million-square-foot Sprint world headquarters in nearby Overland Park. She joined Cambridge-based Tsoi/Kobus & Associates in 2005.
Q: What have been the most important changes in workspace design in the last five years?
A: Most of it started from the technology changes, which have changed the way people work. What they’re finding now in research on the younger generations who grow up on computers is that they think differently. They process information very differently. As those people get older in the workforce there will be another bubble in radical change in how work is done.
Q: How does that affect companies’ space requirements?
A: Radically. All of the technology is getting smaller so it’s less intensive on your space planning efforts. In some respects, technology coordination (used to be) more difficult for designers. Now we can design the space that works for people better, rather than the technology. That’s what you’re seeing in the past five years, focusing on a space that helps people be more productive.
Q: What’s taking the place of the cubicle?
A: Private offices. There is a resurgence in either individually assigned private offices or private work environments for heads-down focus work. The one thing that came out of putting people of all job positions into work stations was there was a lot of backsliding from that. Companies found that people can’t really focus. They’re dissatisfied when they’re trying to focus and there’s noise in the background and people distracting them or coming up behind them when they’re trying to write something. There needs to be private spaces, whether they’re open and informal or closed and more formal.
Q: How do changing workplace designs affect costs?
A: I don’t think companies are as focused on costs as they were in the ’90s. They’re trying to come to grips with a highly complicated group of people working together of all ages and they have very different work patterns. How do we provide an optimum environment for them to be successful, especially in the Boston area where a lot of the work is dependent on creative, new thought and innovation? So they’re more focused on how to create an environment that helps the people do their best work.
Q: What will the typical workspace look like in 2024?
A: It will be smaller as a personal workspace because you don’t need as much stuff. We will get to a less paper-intensive environment. In fact, we’re pretty much there. Computers will get even smaller. Every time I go to a meeting, people pull out their iPad instead of even a laptop at this point. People are still going to need to come to an office to collaborate face-to-face and to have a sense of connectedness as an organization, so companies are going to spend more money on the conferencing facilities, the social environments – the things that hold people together and help create company loyalty.
Top Five Architecturally Distinctive Buildings in Chicago:
- Water Tower, the only public building to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871
- Museum of Science & Industry, built in 1893 for the World’s Columbian Exposition known as The Palace of Fine Arts
- The Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower)
- The John Hancock Center in Chicago
- Marina City
