本文选自经济学人，看看疫情对办公室的改变！

注意事项

经济学人等外刊文章大多数带有强烈的主观推测色彩，往往不能做到实事求是。我们的学习过程中积累地道表达是第一的，第二要带着批判的眼光去看待，第三自己去思考涉及的内容，要一分为二、更要二合为一。

学习建议：

1. 在语境中理解词汇的用法和表达；

2. 了解本文的核心观点和主旨；

The office of the future

Cubicles are out. Bars, neighbourhoods and sensors are in.

隔间已被淘汰。酒吧、社区和传感器已经进入。

The office used to be a place people went because they had to. Meetings happened in conference rooms and in person. Desks took up the bulk of the space. The kingdom of Dilbert and of David Brent is now under threat. The pandemic has exposed the office to competition from remote working, and brought up a host of questions about how it should be designed in the future.

办公室曾经是一个人们不得不去的地方。会议在会议室和个人中进行。办公桌占据了大部分的空间。迪尔伯特和大卫-布伦特的王国现在正受到威胁。这种流行病使办公室面临来自远程工作的竞争，并带来了一系列关于未来应该如何设计办公室的问题。

Start with what the office is for. In the past it was a place for employees to get their work done, whatever form that took. Now other conceptions of its role jostle for attention. Some think of the office as the new offsite. Its purpose is to get people together in person so they can do the things that remote working makes harder: forging deeper relationships or collaborating in real time on specific projects. Others talk of the office as a destination, a place that has to make the idea of getting out of bed earlier, in order to mingle with people who may have covid-19, seem attractive.

从办公室的用途开始。在过去，它是员工完成工作的地方，无论采取什么形式。现在，关于它的作用的其他概念正在争夺注意力。有些人认为办公室是新的非现场。它的目的是让人们聚集在一起，这样他们就可以做一些远程工作难以做到的事情：建立更深的关系或就具体项目进行实时合作。还有人把办公室说成是一个目的地，一个必须让人觉得更早起床，以便与可能有 covid-19 的人打交道的地方有吸引力。

In other words, a layout that is largely devoted to people working at serried desks alongside the same colleagues each day all feels very 2019. With fewer people coming in and more emphasis on collaboration, fewer desks will be assigned to individuals. Instead, there will be more shared areas, or “neighbourhoods”, where people in a team can work together flexibly. (More hot-desking will also necessitate storage space for personal possessions: lockers may soon be back in your life.)

换句话说，一个主要用于人们每天在锯齿状的办公桌前与相同的同事一起工作的布局，都让人感觉很2019。随着进来的人越来越少，越来越强调合作，分配给个人的办公桌会越来越少。相反，将有更多的共享区域，或 "邻里"，团队中的人可以灵活地一起工作。(更多的办公桌也将需要为个人财产提供存储空间：储物柜可能很快就会回到你的生活中）。

To bridge gaps between teams, one tactic is to set aside more of the office to showcase the work of each department, so that people who never encounter each other on Zoom can see examples of what their colleagues do. Another option is to ply everyone with drink. Expect more space to be set aside for socialising and events. Bars in offices are apparently going to be a thing. Robin Klehr Avia of Gensler, an architecture firm, says she is seeing lots of requests for places, like large auditoriums, where a company’s clients can have “experiences”.

为了弥合团队之间的差距，一种策略是留出更多的办公室来展示每个部门的工作，这样那些在 Zoom 上从未遇到过的人就可以看到他们同事的工作实例。另一个选择是向每个人灌输意识。预计会有更多的空间被留出来用于社交和活动。办公室里的酒吧显然会成为一种现象。建筑公司 Gensler 的 Robin Klehr Avia 说，她看到很多人要求提供像大型礼堂这样的场所，让公司的客户可以有 "体验"。

Designs for the post-covid office must also allow for hybrid work. Meetings have to work for virtual participants as well as for in-person contributors: cameras, screens and microphones will proliferate. Gensler’s New York offices feature mini-meeting rooms that have a monitor and a half-table jutting out from the wall below it, with seating for four or five people arranged to face the screen, not each other.

新冠疫情后的办公室设计也必须允许混合工作。会议必须适用于虚拟参与者和亲自参与的人：摄像机、屏幕和麦克风将大量涌现。Gensler 的纽约办公室有一个迷你会议室，里面有一个显示器和一张从下面的墙上伸出来的半张桌子，四五个人的座位被安排成面对屏幕，而不是彼此。

Variety will be another theme. People may plan to work in groups in the morning, but need to concentrate on something in the afternoon. Ryan Anderson of Herman Miller, a furniture firm, likens the difference between the pre- and post-pandemic office to that between a hotel and a home. Hotels are largely given over to rooms for individuals. “Home is thought of as a place for a family over years, hosting lots of different activities.”

多样性将是另一个主题。人们可能计划在上午分组工作，但在下午需要集中精力做一些事情。赫曼米勒（Herman Miller）家具公司的瑞恩-安德森（Ryan Anderson）将大流行前和大流行后办公室的区别比作酒店和家庭的区别。酒店在很大程度上被赋予了个人的房间。"家被认为是一个家庭多年来的场所，承载着许多不同的活动"。

All of which implies the need for flexibility. Laptop docking stations are simple additions, but other bits of office furniture are harder to overhaul. Desks themselves tend to be tethered to the floor through knotted bundles of cables and plugs. The office of the future may well feature desks with wheels, which ought to go well with all that extra alcohol. Meeting rooms are likely to be more flexible, too, with walls that lift and slide.

所有这些都意味着对灵活性的需求。笔记本电脑基座是简单的补充，但办公家具的其他部分就很难改造了。办公桌本身往往通过打结的电缆和插头捆绑在地板上。未来的办公室很可能以带轮子的办公桌为特色，这应该与所有额外的酒精相匹配。会议室也可能会更加灵活，墙壁可以升降和滑动。

If socialising and flexibility are two of the themes of the post-pandemic office, a third is data. Property and hr managers alike will want more data in order to understand how facilities are being used, and on which days and times people are bunching in the office. Workers will demand more data on health risks: the quality of ventilation within meeting rooms, say, or proper contact-tracing if a colleague tests positive for the latest covid-19 variant.

如果社交和灵活性是后大流行时代办公室的两个主题，那么第三个主题就是数据。物业和人力资源经理都希望得到更多的数据，以了解设施的使用情况，以及人们在哪些日子和时间聚集在办公室里。工人们将需要更多关于健康风险的数据：比如说，会议室内的通风质量，或者当一个同事对最新的 covid-19 变体检测呈阳性时，适当的接触追踪。

And data will flow more copiously in response: from sensors in desks and lighting but also from desk-booking tools and visitor-management apps. The question of who owns data on office occupants and what consent mechanisms are needed to gather this information is about to become more pressing.

作为回应，数据将更加丰富：来自办公桌和照明的传感器，也来自办公桌预订工具和访客管理应用程序。谁拥有办公人员的数据以及收集这些信息需要什么样的同意机制，这个问题将变得更加紧迫。

Put this all together and what do you get? If you are an optimist, the office of the future will be a spacious, collaborative environment that makes the commute worth it. If you are a pessimist, it will be a building full of heavily surveilled drunkard. In reality, pragmatic considerations—how much time is left on the lease, the physical constraints of a building’s layout, uncertainty about the path of the pandemic—will determine the pace of change. Whatever happens, the office won't be what it was.

把这一切放在一起，你会得到什么？如果你是一个乐观主义者，未来的办公室将是一个宽敞的、协作的环境，使通勤变得值得。如果你是一个悲观主义者，它将是一栋充满严重监视的醉汉的大楼。在现实中，务实的考虑——租约还剩多少时间，建筑布局的物理限制，大流行病路径的不确定性——将决定变革的步伐。无论发生什么，办公室都不会是原来的样子。