Office-as-a-Service

I've always thought it's a shame that offices are such static, monolithic things. Especially as more people are working remotely, travel for work, or have flexible hours, it seems like the ability to make a new-generation flexible workspace would be a really big deal. In software infrastructure we have containerised and packaged services delivered on demand, and I don't see why we can't do the same thing for workspaces. I think of it as Office-as-a-Service.

It'd work like this: your office can be made of any number of standard components. You choose chairs, desks, screens, decorations, etc and set them up however you like in the room. When you check out, pictures are taken of the room recording the position and orientation of each item. Then, any time you like, you can migrate your office to a new location; a new city, a new country, a new spot in the same building, whatever. You can even suspend the office on days you're not using it to free up the resources.

When you check in to a new place, a crew of technicians would set up an instance of your office exactly the way you left it. They'd pull the requisite components out of storage (imagine an IKEA attached to each OaaS venue), move it all into the location, then use some kind of AR-style overlay to make sure all the items line up exactly with the saved images. You walk in and sit down as if nothing ever changed, even though you're in a different place. It's like your office is a magic room that disappears and reappears wherever and whenever you want it.

You could even have custom items that get shipped from place to place for things that aren't really replicable. But I think having too much custom stuff and turning the OaaS into a glorified moving service would be kind of missing the point. If you can make your office entirely out of the standard components then there would be very minimal set-up time and cost. You could push a button and have an instance of your office set up in under an hour.

Come to think of it, there's no reason it would need to be just offices. Imagine if you could get on a plane today, arrive tomorrow, and go straight to the same bedroom you left from – but in Barcelona or Tokyo? That would really be something.