anecdotal experiment

This morning I plugged in Baby, pulled over my favorite style of chair, and sank contentedly into it. I’m so much happier here where the furniture doesn’t match; I hear English, Spanish and toddler talk; and I can watch a foursome of young professionals grab soy laced beverages and chattily return to their “green” Mercedes carpool.

Would I be able to select a chair in the new coworking space? Well, first of all it wouldn’t be necessary because the furniture matches, but the more important negative is that I wouldn’t feel free to move things around. While I agree with Stutzman that the space is professional looking, I had the feeling right from the start that I wouldn’t be encouraged to hang my little poster and opted to display it on my rented desk instead.

Yes, it was partially new kid deference to smoothly painted walls and first-hand furniture that directed my behavior, but also the parallel mention of a password protected space for coworkers to blog, pending administrative approval of the content, as well as other chilly signals.

I’m new to coworking, excited about examining starfish enterprises, and years from my days in a corporate mandated cell; however, I don’t think my naiveté has crippled my well practiced consumer intuition enough to deny something is wrong here. And don’t blame it on wobbly-legged entrepreneurship, because if someone is really into community building and “viral marketing,” they instinctively won’t begin with an imperial attitude.

Perhaps it’s the mentality of an artist shaping a creation, his or her vision, but if so, how are other creative people making welcoming, successful coworking spaces? What does planning “funky” achieve besides another Rockola cafe? I didn’t realize I was signing up for a franchise opportunity.

I used the fact that our coworking office opens mid morning to return at 7 a.m. to my old nook at the cafe and ponder how the office could achieve the “cafe-like collaboration,” which defines coworking but isn’t yet happening in this new facility (it is only day three).

Well, actually, after accepting free help from a Linux pro I snagged in the hall today, I’ll revise that last statement to note that the collaborative sparks were already ignited, having started online through social media and sponsorship of local tech events.

So if we’ve achieved the collaborative aspect of the mandate, how (without distressing all that beautiful new furniture) do we create the sensory welcome of our former, favorite workspace? Besides plenty of visual interest (the cafe walls refresh every month or so; the students, entrepreneurs, kilted runners, parents of tots, and retirees do not), the cafe’s noises are familiar and energizing.

In the morning you hear only the tinkling of porcelain and swinging of the door as people gratefully take warm cups to their laptops or loop right back into traffic. Next, a soundtrack starts and people begin to pair up, either by appointment or serendipity; work begins, the conversations blending enough to allow bits of eavesdropping without complete comprehension. By nine o’clock the early risers turn over peripheral tables to grad students who need the outlets (for their peripherals). People close their papers and finish emails as if they have somewhere else to go, or maybe just because it’s getting too loud to concentrate.

I hope they’ll head down to our local coworking space, because although all full-time desks are reserved, only half the occupants have shown up, and it’s too quiet. People are grouping in the front of the suite, which is great, but the only sounds in the back are my conversations with myself, not exactly a selling point.

I expect, though, that as the back offices fill, this contrast will become an advantage. The space now offers communal areas for mingling (you can work at your own desk or in a shared space) or quiet ones for complicated tasks or conversations with clients. And, like our cafe, as artists fill the space with their work, the office will be open for the 2ndFriday Artwalk and other special events. I look forward to those footsteps.

[Originally published elsewhere on October 8th. I've removed direct references to the locale.]