Your Dream Office is Just Over There: Co-Working and the Instant Creative Community

When we start out in a creative career, most of us have a certain idealized image of what our work day will look like: there will be high ceilings and large windows, hiply dressed 30-somethings having insightful conversations about aesthetic minutiae, and a charming mixture of bleeding-edge technology and old-school architectural details. There will probably be drawings or printouts pinned to the wall by the dozen, and some obscure objects scattered artfully about, to add visual spice.

To be sure, some design offices are like this, and some advertising and architecture firms too, but for most of us, reality is decidedly less fabulous. For the freelancer or contractor--and that's a category that's growing at breakneck speed--the options are even scarcer. A temporary on-site cubicle, a cobbled-together home office, and a jovial but ultimately isolating coffee shop are the three most common options, and all of them lack the most important quality of the ideal creative workspace: other creative workers with whom to interact. It's well understood that good ideas and good creative work flow almost never flourish in a vacuum, and yet increasingly we are asked to make them do so. And we're not alone. New media professionals have been dealing with this issue since day one, sometime back in the 90s, and writers have been dealing for far longer. Some of them have solved the problem in the most obvious way, by starting their own company or publication and filling it with good collaborators, but in this time of high rents and unstable work loads, it's a tricky option at best.

A less orthodox and perhaps more appropriate solution to this dilemma has been proposed in recent years, and goes by the slightly touchy-feely name of Coworking. Like a laborer's equivalent of cohousing, coworking got its conceptual start in the artists' and writers' collectives that started appearing in big cities as early as the beginning of last century, though they didn't achieve a freelancer-appropriate configuration until recently. The structure of a modern co-working group is fairly simple: grab a bunch of freelance or contract workers who find their productivity flagging in the absence of a peer group, and gather them together in a single dedicated space.

Some coworking groups, like the multi-city Jelly, are nothing more than a once- or twice-weekly meet-up in a rented or donated room--even someone's apartment--where everyone brings a laptop, starts working, and hopes for group synergy to manifest. Others, like San Francisco's Citizen Space, are full-fledged business ventures, where an entrepreneur or two buys or rents a space, and kits it out with desks, conference rooms and an environment aimed at the type of hip urban creative professional that would drive Richard Florida into paroxysms of New Economy delight. In both cases the goal is the same: to drive productivity by surrounding each worker with similarly driven peers, encouraging, inspiring and hopefully collaborating with each other. It's an intangible boon, but one meaningful enough that some workers are giving up their home offices and paying some of their hard-earned cash to get it.

By all accounts, they are getting their money's worth. In just the past year, Wired, BusinessWeek and the New York Post have all run articles on the phenomenon, and have no shortage of interviewees with glowing things to say about it. The predictably web-savvy co-working community has also put together a Google Map of group locations, and the number of locations and rate of spread suggest this could be a solution to a long ignored problem.

It's tempting to take a broader view of the whole coworking thing after reading through all the hype, and see it instead as a step on a continuum. Working together in coffee shops, diners and bars is a much wider-spread phenomenon, after all, and a number of recently created "official" coworking spaces got their start in just such an environment. Independents Hall, a coworking office in Philadelphia, came to life because a group of friends who met working together at a bar eventually outgrew the space. And just as a small segment of "casual coworkers" (read: Starbucks acquaintances) decide to cement and formalize their relationship, a small segment of coworkers can eventually decide to go one step further and make it permanent, as a group of Portland creative professionals did last year, calling themselves TENPOD. Call it Coworking 2: Tying the Knot. TENPOD's concept is similar to the coworking paradigm, except each of the ten companies is a small business or sole proprietorship who have pooled funds and resources to communally occupy a space.

The effect of all these developments is one of increased flexibility; an expansion of options in working environment to match the growing flexibility of the creative career. Even as tighter budgets and more disposable staffing policies have led legions of professionals into labor arrangements that would have been unrecognizable to their parents, the employers enacting these changes have largely left working environments the same as ever. Leave it to the workers themselves to discover that greater uncertainty can also mean greater freedom, and to use that freedom to get to their idealized office all by themselves.