The Welcoming Workplace: rethinking office design to enable growing numbers of older people to participate in the 21st century knowledge economy

In the early years of the 21st Century, there are a growing number of older workers who will not retire from the office workplace but will remain at work for longer, many of them on a consultancy, special-project or part-time basis. Several factors are driving this trend: a shortfall in pension funds; a management emphasis on retaining knowledge and experience built up over years; age and disability discrimination legislation offering more protection for older workers; and, above all, the plain demographic facts of ageing (one in two adults in the European Union will be over 50 by 2020).

At the same time as the age balance of the workforce is changing, the type of work we do in offices is changing too. Today, much of the repetitive process work that once occupied cast numbers of office workers is done by computers.

This project addresses ways in which the office environment can be redesigned to offer greater levels of comfort and flexibility in the new age of the older knowledge worker. The study seeks to examine the interconnected factors that make-up the office environment - physical, spatial, technological, economic, social cultural and philosophical – and develop a theoretical framework within which a programme of user research and design interventions on specific workplace site can be planned and delivered.

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