New Work Places of The Transition and Information Society: Virtual and Serviced Offices

Abstract

The working places, which are one of the most important parts of the daily life of man, did not show continuous improvement throughout the history. Instead, it has transformed and leaps at certain breakpoints that have emerged over time as a result of global and local dynamics, and sometimes it has simultaneously exhibited a diverse formation with different derivatives in different geographies. In today's world where digital technologies are developing rapidly, and especially in pandemic conditions that have surrounded the world and are not known for how long, all work places have started to be questioned and restructured. A number of obligations that emerged under the pandemic conditions underlined the urgency of redefining and planning the spaces for some functions, especially education, shopping and accommodation, for the post-epidemic period called the "new normal". In this process, the importance of designing work spaces as flexible spaces suitable for transformation and adaptation, where different alternatives can be considered and built together, has been understood.

In this study, the historical process of office typology has been investigated and it has been explained how it has gone through this process from the agricultural society to the industrial society and from there to the information society. After this briefing, the concept of virtual office, the main focus of the text, was discussed in detail. The time-space of virtual offices, which can be accepted as the new office type of the information society, has positive and negative aspects, quite different from the time-space of the traditional office. The text presenting these aspects results in assumptions about how virtual offices will be in the future and aims to contribute to the literature by clearly revealing the differences of the virtual office type from the most mixed other types.