Technologies for Shared Office Space

LpR 72 Article, page 66: Shared office spaces are gaining popularity as a flexible, resource-efficient and creativity-inspiring way to work. The dynamic nature of such office spaces requires building automation and lighting control solutions that can quickly be deployed and easily be adapted to new office layouts. Matthias Kassner, Vice President Product Marketing at EnOcean GmbH, takes a look at different connectivity architectures (wired, wireless, hybrid) and protocols (Bluetooth, ZigBee, EnOcean, PoE) to assess their usability and show how minimizing the need for maintenance is a key for increasing profitability of service-based offerings.

An average of 50% of the available space in a typical office building remains unoccupied over the course of a business day. At the same time, space in cities is getting very short and incredibly expensive. To counter this trend, services for shared office space are becoming more and more popular. Beside flexible and adaptable room layouts, there is a need for data infrastructures that enable demand-based intelligent control of all building areas. Thereby, not all technologies are equally suitable for solving the requirements of such an agile concept.

Co-working has had a major impact on the performance and utilization of commercial real estate. It has been responsible for a significant amount of positive net absorption in major metropolitan markets enabled by additional investments into upgrades and expansions of amenities in existing buildings. From humble beginnings in 2007 with just 14 of such spaces in operation, it was estimated that during 2018 more than 600,000 people would be working in 4,500 co-working spaces in the US alone. The worldwide number of such spaces was expected to top 15,000 by the end of 2018 [1].

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