Office space at the Alberta Conservation Association can be a sight reminiscent of mankind’s earlier roles as hunter/gatherers.

Wildlife biologist Shevenell Webb’s office is filled with natural artifacts she found during her field work in Alberta’s wild lands. There’s a bighorn sheep skull next to her computer monitor and full grouse tail feathers decorating her whiteboard.

“It’s a conversation piece,” she says, noting that other biologists like her find items on trails. Surrounding Webb’s desk, pine marten, badger and eastern coyote pelts hang from the walls which she says inspires curiosity in the people who visit her indoor workstation.

The ACA is a not-for-profit with eight offices across the province from St. Paul to Lethbridge to Cochrane. Webb’s indoor office is in Sherwood Park. The associaiton’s long-term research projects are funded in large part by levies put on hunting and fishing licenses which allow the ACA to publish studies on the health of wildlife populations.

For every wildlife biologist, Webb says, there’s a necessary division of time between the data entry of the chair and desk and the research work in the province’s mountains, forests and rivers. She laughs as she says that she’d rather be outside, “We obviously get into this work we like being outdoors.”

You’ll find her other office – her outdoor office – shelved neatly in the console of a truck, a helicopter or a small six-wing Cessna airplane. Webb might also work out of a tent trailer for longer stints in the field. These highly mobile outdoor offices for wildlife biologists require clipboards, filing folders, compasses and binoculars. Everything, she says, needs to be wrapped with brightly coloured flagging tape: “We’ve all lost pretty much everything in the field that you can lose.”

With a laugh, she adds bear spray to the list. She has seen every type of animal in her work, including the very shy ones like wolverines and the Canada lynx. During a bird survey a few years ago, she came within 30 feet of a black bear which, she says, was a bit too comfortable spending time near her group.

ACA biologists like Webb mix their time between the indoor and outdoor office through every season. Webb conducts bird surveys in the early morning hours of the spring and works on interpretive trails and vegetation surveys through the summer. During winter, her office goes aerial as she climbs aboard helicopters and small planes to count ungulate populations – definitely one of the cooler parts of her job.

Data entry and analysis, however, is done behind a computer screen at a conventional desk. It’s the other half of her job, which means coming down from the mountain top and doing the hard science on Alberta’s wildlife populations.

Offices like Webb’s show what happens when an outdoorsy worker is cooped-up inside. The shelves are filled with books on wildlife and photos taken in breath-taking mountain ranges. Much of the typical office grey is replaced with green as the artifacts and their stories get carried in from outside.

Webb, who will be going on maternity leave in September, will return to ACA to work both indoors and outdoors. “That’s ultimately my connection and why we have passion for what we do,” she says of her own work and that of other ACA biologists.

“If you lost your connection with the field, then you might lose that connection with how things work in the environment, so it’s important to get outside.”

A high-tech network of micro-offices sits unassumingly behind the 19th-century façade of a downtown-Toronto heritage building.

The MaRS Incubator is 20,000 square feet of office and wet lab space across two floors in Toronto’s Discovery District. Designed to aid business start-ups, the incubator is truncated into a series of smaller offices that provide new – primarily science- and medical-based – companies affordable rent and access to lab facilities. The minimum size for an office in the incubator is 160 square feet.

Passing by renovations to the heritage Toronto General Hospital on his way to work in a nearby university lab every morning, Jason Sharpe, one of three founders at AXS Biomedical Animation Studios, decided on the MaRS Incubator’s office space as platform to launch a new business.

Sharpe’s studio began as a 300-square foot operation within the incubator in 2005. He calls it “A huge convenience for a company that’s starting out.” For small companies that can’t afford the large and lavish offices hawked by commercial realtors, the incubator provides a convenient place to grow a business in downtown Toronto. “We moved in and the office was set up. We had Internet, phone, desks, lighting, power – we didn’t have to worry about any of that and we could just focus on our business right from the start.”

Right now, there are 20 small businesses renting subsidized office space in the incubator which is part of the larger MaRS Centre – a public-private partnership aimed at connecting science research with the business community. “MaRS itself is a global address, so it gives [small companies] a cachet, a boost, to be located here,” says Linda Quattrin, the centre’s director of communications.

While the MaRS Centre also leases to major players like the Royal Bank of Canada, Quattrin says the highest demand for MaRS space is in the incubator, which fields applications from five to 10 companies at any one time. She says that the incubator is a place where small companies have “accidental collisions” with other start-ups; shared lab space for science firms, shared meeting rooms for service companies and shared kitchen, photocopying and common areas for all give the incubator’s 20 companies ample opportunity to interact.

Sharpe’s studio for instance collaborated with two other incubator clients, Octopz Inc. and Constab Pharmaceuticals Inc., on marketing and visual design. Octopz is a software company and Constab is a science-start up. Sharpe says that AXS’s studio worked with both companies with marketing and to help them visualize their products. He adds, that while “the idea there is to break down silos” MaRS is still learning to encourage the connections between companies in the incubator. “These are science companies; some get in there, put their blinders on and get to work.”

The incubator’s location within the greater MaRS Centre – and MaRS’s complicated network of links with the University of Toronto, city hospitals, government and businesses – gives small companies access to subsidized legal advice, entrepreneurial workshops as well as heavyweight marketing and professional relations, like Buzz Aldrin’s well-publicized visit to MaRS in May. The collection of small tenants within the incubator –as well as the larger blue-chip tenants in the larger complex – collectively forms a larger identity which translates to more visibility for a small company.

“Being in that building gave us instant credibility with clients and potential clients,” Sharpe says. AXS has now outgrown the incubator space at MaRS and had to move into a mid-sized office elsewhere in Toronto. The company has grown to six people and continues to attract new clients, like Splice, a movie starring Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley.

The ESRI Canada head office looks like any other tower along the busiest commuter route in Toronto: nine storeys encased by banks of shiny glass windows.

But way up above the Don Valley Parkway, on the eighth floor roof, a green oasis awaits staff, complete with a herb garden, shrubs, grasses, an outdoor boardroom and plenty of space to sit.

The roof at the ERSI Canada office wasn’t always a lush garden space. When the geographic information systems software company moved into new digs – two floors of a shared office building north of downtown – its ninth floor space included an 8,000-square-foot deck paved in concrete tiles. It was accessible to staff, but not that appealing.

Company president Alex Miller saw big potential.

“We’re an environmental company,” Miller says, noting that ESRI stands for Environmental Systems Research Institute. “Our business is building geographic information systems for our customers. We wanted to set an example of what a company could do, for a relatively small amount of money overall, at improving the sustainability of our surrounding environment.”

ESRI doesn’t own the building. It’s a tenant. So, Miller worked with the landlord to install a temporary rooftop garden. Vegetation was pre-grown on trays three feet long, 18 inches wide and about six inches deep. Contractors installed the roof greenery over two weekends in spring 2009. If ESRI moves to another building, it can pack up, green roof and all.

Green roofs are gaining popularity in Toronto, where the city provides green roof grants, largely because the vegetation helps manage rainwater runoff, taking some of the burden off aging sewer systems. This roof, and others like it, also helps mitigate the urban heat island effect, where cities are often hotter than the rural areas surrounding them because of all the concrete. As a bonus, green roofs insulate, and can cut down on heating and cooling costs.

At ESRI, the architect who designed the space used shrubbery, other plants and paving to mirror the internal office design. There’s even an outdoor boardroom surrounded by planters and shrubs that can be used for formal meetings, at least when the weather co-operates.

“You don’t want your paper blowing away, off the ninth floor,” Miller says. “We’re more likely to use it for lunches and things like that.”

As an added bonus, office workers who used to look out onto concrete have something a little more appealing to gaze at. Even in the winter, tall grasses poke out from under the snow.

“These tall Prairie grasses wave in the wind,” Miller says. “Even a little bit of wind makes them wave back and forth. As a result, you get a sense of what the weather is like outside. Not just the sun and the clouds, but you actually see the wind.”

The green roof isn’t the only environmental initiative at ESRI. Working with the landlord, ESRI is retrofitting the ballasts on the old light fixtures and has already cut electricity consumption by about 30 per cent. Server room overhauls aim to further reduce energy use.

There are big plans for the roof this summer, including two customer receptions. The company will also add more furniture and benches, allowing the staff of 200 to take full advantage of the space.

Check out this video ESRI made about their experience with their green roof.

“It’s all about the people, so why not give them the best views? The principals are entitled to offices but when we moved into the space, they decided to sit out in the studio close to the windows and be a part of the team,” says Dean Matsumoto, a principal with Kasian who directed the interior design of the office.

Their democratic approach to office space helps promote equality and team building while making it easy for people to move around after projects are completed.

Built in a soft loft style with around 20,000 square feet, the architecture, interior design and planning firms’ Toronto office is a light-filled collaborative space. The walls are free from fancy prints and motivational sayings. Instead every wall in the office is magnetic, whiteboard or tackable and covered in the work of the moment.

“We’re always pinning up work to look at it, study it. The walls serve a purpose.”

A favourite feature of Matsumoto’s is the “Touchdown” area. It links the boardroom to the reception area with a long glass table. A multi-use area, one day it could be home to a standup project presentation, another it might double as “the best bar in Toronto.”

The first thing you see when entering the office is the view of downtown Toronto.

It’s located west of downtown, near the trendy and newly converted to mixed use Liberty Village. Surrounded by artists and fellow creatives, Matsumoto is very happy with the location.

“There is lots of live-work space around us. It’s a very vibrant neighbourhood. It’s helped us to attract people.”

The open kitchen is incorporated into what Matsumoto calls the “marketplace.” You’ll find the copy machine, fax, printers and office supplies as well as the research library all in the same place. If you have to go up and get some “stuff,” this is where you’ll be going.

Matsumoto, who designed the space, loves how it came together.

“The fact that it’s so bright is energizing right off the bat. One thing about our office is that there is nowhere to hide because it’s so open. The people that you’re working with are immediately accessible.”

The Montreal headquarters of Switzerland Creative Services would make Ikea addicts cringe.

It’s not that the creative boutique, which boasts satellite offices in Toronto and the Bronx, N.Y., isn’t deserving of a second look. It’s just that operations director Ben Pobjoy and creative head Shawn Butchart favour an esthetic that leans toward taxidermy, vinyl LPs and a healthy assortment of vintage junk over the mass-produced, ergonomic furniture popular among firms who trade in type.

“There’s the stereotype of a lot of design offices that are really clean and modern,” Pobjoy says over the phone from the company’s Montreal workspace. “Our office tends to be a lot more Pee-wee Herman in nature.”

Antique tin cans pasted with yesterday’s advertising slogans, pop artwork, prints of old typography, photography and yes, stuffed animals, fill out the space, which doubles as an art gallery come summertime. “There’s a grouse on the wall, which is really wicked because it’s flying, and I think a mallard duck and a pheasant above where we keep cutlery,” Pobjoy says, rhyming off the oddities, which also include a set of mounted antlers (whether moose, elk or deer, he’s not sure).

The strange surroundings belie the hardworking set of artistic entrepreneurs – a graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and visual artist, respectively – that make up the Swiss team. Their current abode is a former ground-level loft that serves as the headquarters for three separate entities: Switzerland Creative Services, the Emporium Gallery and a software development venture called Red Tree.

Recent projects include branding and design work for New York City-based cinematographer Nadia Hallgren, whose credits include the 2008 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning film Trouble the Water, as well as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. 

Pobjoy says his firm’s clubhouse-feel – the office doesn’t have a boardroom, and there’s no secretary to mind the phones – and throwback décor are both intrinsic to the in-house creative processes. The relaxed approach also reflects a business model that’s increasingly nomadic, he notes. “Physical space is important for face-to-face collaboration, but I feel as though it’s less and less important in terms of its traditional use.”

Business these days is conducted wirelessly and increasingly in transit. “That’s how it’s evolved. [The office] is more of a place just to charge your computer than anything else.”

Still, there are pleasures unique to the Swiss digs. “We’re one of the few offices that have at least five or six hundred LPs on hand,” Pobjoy says. (The selection runs the gamut from Hank Williams Sr. to Run DMC).

What constitutes a typical day? “I would say a lot of coffee, a lot of vinyl, a lot of work and a lot of smokes would sum it up.”

By Craille Maguire Gillies | Photography by Pete Aspros, Grip Limited

There is nothing like a big orange slide plonked right in the middle of an office to obliterate hierarchy between upper management and everyone else. But then Toronto creative agency Grip Limited, home to that big orange slide, has never been a place for hierarchy. Grip, whose clients include Acura, Lululemon Athletica and Labatt, has an unusually linear team, with an astounding 11 partners. David Crichton, one of eight founding partners calls it a “flat structure” in which partners work directly with clients, and therefore with their own designers, writers, interactive and technical staff who put together campaigns. “There’s no corner office mentality. There isn’t actually a corner office,” Crichton says, adding that newly hired president Harvey Carroll has the worst digs in the space – a small, drafty office that no one else wants.

Grip’s office – designed by the folks at Johnson Chou and featuring the agency’s signature orange logo – is  spread over two and a half floors, and reflects the open attitude of the agency. (And the fireman’s pole in the atrium is great when you’re running late for meetings.) Crichton spoke with Unlimited about breaking down barriers – and walls.

+ Every Thursday, many of the company’s 100-plus staff gather in the atrium for a 4:30 beer-fuelled news briefing. (It counts Labatt as one of its longtime clients.) “On Thursdays we open up the draft taps and play foosball,” says Crichton. “The atrium is basically stadium seating for announcements.”

+ The company has events called “What’s your story?” when anybody in the company – from someone in the production studio to a creative director –  can present new ideas.

+ They notice the little things. White Astroturf lines one of the boardrooms. “It deadens sound,” Crichton says, “but it’s also not expensive. We like to do things creatively that don’t involve spending a lot of money. It sends a message to clients that you can be creative without being excessive.”

+ That working-class ethos turns up in Grip’s logo, a bright 1960s-style orange circle meant to show the company’s working-class roots. “I would say the culture here is pretty peer-oriented. Our partners work on a client’s file directly, so that means we worked directly with everyone here,” Crichton says. (Click to see a TV reel of some of Grip’s work.)

+ The non-linear structure of the company lets employees move between departments for rare wholesale career changes within the same company. For instance, a longtime studio manager became a designer and later an art director. One former IT staffer went on to become a multimedia editor/producer at Grip’s in-house production facility. The strategy is to “let people make a career change and then keep them in the company. At the end of the day, [the happiness of] a bigger paycheque only lasts two pay periods. If you provide a place where people like to work and are respected, they’ll be happier and more enthusiastic.” U

Stuart Bailey is a private person – at least when it comes to work. In agreeing to speak with Unlimited about his job, for instance, he cheerfully and apologetically said, “I can only speak for myself, not for the government.” That’s because Bailey is an information management and privacy strategist for the Ontario Ministry of Finance, where he navigates the complex, sometimes intangible and often confidential world of data. Not that he’s necessarily trading in top-secret information – “I don’t have a lot of sensitive material,” he admits – but for someone whose work is all about managing, sharing (and sometimes not sharing) information, Bailey is sensitive to the challenges of describing what he does without saying too much. He gives it a try.

The Man Who Wasn’t There: Stuart Bailey’s official office at the Ministry of Finance

“My job is to help regular people in different program areas integrate practice and information into their daily work.” Huh? “Really, it’s helping people deal with information overload,” Bailey adds. Oh, right.

That could range from helping staffers manage email to helping colleagues understand the logistics and legalities around sharing information. “Storage is cheap, but finding it is very expensive,” Bailey says. A gigabyte of storage might cost only 20 cents, but a company will have to shell out another $1,300 or so to manage, share and protect that information. “It’s not just about an object sitting in a space.”

“The type of work I do is about understanding broad abstractions. Information,” he points out, “is always part of something else that you do.” In that sense, we are each de facto information managers, even though we might not consider this part of our real jobs. It is always, Bailey explains, wrapped up in our other tasks.

After earning a BA in cultural studies and philosophy from Trent University, Bailey went on to complete a master’s in information studies at the University of Toronto. Warm and engaging, his philosophy background quickly surfaces. “A large part of the work I do is – pardon me for lapsing into code – to understand basic metaphysics, entities, attributes and relationships. I have to operate in abstract areas. Privacy is not a monolithic object. It’s not a like a shoe,” he says. “A shoe will have certain dimensions, it goes on your foot, you can wear it in certain weather. But privacy could be a whole range of things.”

Bailey’s Virtual Office

Bailey, whose official mailing address is for the Central Agencies Cluster at the Ministry of Finance in Toronto, in actuality divides his time between three offices.

Bailey telecommutes from his couch-office

+ This office in the picture is where I’m stationed, but sometimes I work with the rest of the team in Oshawa. I also work at home. My employer has a great teleworking project and a lot of flexibility. I spend more time focusing on work and less on additional stressors like whether I’ll make it home in time to pick up my daughter before her daycare closes.

+ I have one computer and BlackBerry. It’s not like I produce a certain number of widgets a day. Where I’m located is sometimes not as important. I don’t always have to be tied to a desk, but I do have to ingest, analyze and provide comment on information for colleagues.

+ Yeah, sometimes I can’t find things. It’s like asking a ditch-digger where you put the shovel. Well, you can just find another shovel.

+ That’s a tennis ball on my desk. I bounce it around to relieve stress or think about things in a different way. Sometimes the best way to focus on an abstract problem is not to focus on it. You have to let the brain refresh and let your mind wander.

+ Those boxes are filled with paperwork. Although I work a lot with electronic media, I like the tactile quality of reaching for an article. I have to stay on top of new developments such as the use of wikis or policy development or a recent court decision. I make sure I don’t keep more around than I need. U

Cameron Smith does not bring home the bacon. In fact, he makes it himself. For up to 100 hours a week, six month per year, Smith and Dana Ewart, his partner in both business and life (they sign emails from their work account “Cam and Dana”), make pretty much everything themselves – from peach galettes with fruit that was just plucked from the tree to elaborate al fresco dinners at wineries sprinkled through the Okanagan.

Originally from Ontario, the pair were kitchen competitors at top restaurants such as Toque! in Montreal and Scaramouche in Toronto before ditching their high-stress jobs to take a semi-sabbatical. After a stretch as tree planters, the 30-something pair set up Joy Road Catering in the basement of their home near Penticton.

Cameron Smith and Dana Ewart of Joy Road Catering

The work is still high-stress, and the challenges these entrepreneurs face is a little unusual. “It’s a lot harder dealing with hippie farmers,” Ewart says. As Smith puts it, “In a restaurant there are multiple deadlines and they can seem life or death at the time, but if a farmer has something more important to do they will bring that lamb tomorrow. Or if the raspberry field is wet, they won’t go out and pick the berries even though we’ll be pulling our hair out because we have a dinner that night with a dessert that needs raspberries.”

The perks of self-employment, however, outweigh the frustrations. “The restaurant industry is very fickle. You get a good review one day and the phone rings off hook. But if you don’t get reviewed for two weeks, your restaurant is dead,” Smith explains. “There was a real opportunity for us here. The ingredients were here, the farms are here, the wine is here and the clientele have educated palates and are excited about what we do. I think we’d still be successful in the city, but people here they get it. They see the vines, see where the wine came from, we see the person who grew the carrots.” Lower start-up costs and overhead make catering a smart business move for a chef. The ability to, as Smith puts it, change a menu on a dime, rather than sticking to a stale two-month old menu, for instance, is another benefit.

Ewart and Smith only operate when they can get fresh local food, which packs a year’s worth of revenue and work into half the time of a traditional catering company. They start up in May when the first wild watercress and peas become available and shut down when frost hits in November.

A typical day goes something like this: Wake up at 7 a.m., answer emails, make phone calls and write up shopping and prep lists. Create a schedule for that night’s event, assign staff tasks for the day, and write lists of what equipment and special ingredients they’ll need. At 10 a.m., the four full-time staff arrives (they also have a bunch of part-timers) and everyone preps food until 1 p.m. The staff takes turns cooking for the daily sit-down lunch – no brown bag lunches here – which is often the only chance they have in a 16-hour day for a proper meal. Later in the afternoon, they pack up the vans, triple-check their checklist and head off to the venue, where Smith and Ewart have 10 minutes to make themselves at home in a foreign space. The day ends sometime around 11 p.m. when they drive home, unload coolers, wash dishes and go to bed. Then they repeat that almost every day for the rest of the season.

“It’s pretty nuts. In summer, we’ll stay up all night Friday baking, go to the farmers’ market on Saturday, have our crew prep all the produce we bring home that afternoon and then it’s show time: two different weddings on Saturday and dinners at wineries on Sunday,” Ewart says. All told, they feed about 500 people on a given weekend, then spend Monday – their busiest day – ordering food and clearing through paperwork. “We crash in November.”

Like their schedules, the Joy Road Catering “office” – actually a basement kitchen retrofitted to accommodate Smith, Ewart, four full-time staff and a bunch of part-timers – is unusual. We counted nine pairs of prongs, for starters. Below, Ewart and Smith describe their space.

Ewart (far right) and Cameron Smith (in chef's white) preside over the Joy Road HQ

Anatomy of  a Kitchen

+ The pair went to an auction sale and, as Ewart puts it, “set ourselves up on quite a dime.” The chopping blocks ($75 each) came from an old butcher shop. “They have a history. They’re made with gorgeous piece of wood and have railway ties going through them,” Ewart says.
+ Big French doors lead to the garden and chicken coop. “We have a rocket launcher out back that we bought from our dear friend Angus An at Maenam restaurant in Vancouver. We use it to sear meats and make huge stocks and batches of steamy jam,” says Ewart. Every piece comes with a story. “There’s a crew who moved west and opened our own businesses at the same time. It was neat going through all those growing pains of opening our own business.”
+ Posters from numerous events Joy Road has worked at decorate the walls. Other art includes an oversized photo of an unlikely source of culinary inspiration: Albert Einstein. “It’s says something like great spirits have always encountered violent opposition,” Smith says. “It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it symbolizes how you need to go your own way, do you own thing, you cannot care what the establishment will say.”
+ The best part of the Joy Road headquarters is the view of the Okanagan – not to mention the outdoor beer tap. “That’s also where we keep our fridge,” says Smith.
+ “We prep in this kitchen, but our office is wherever we’ve been hired to go,” Smith explains. “The challenge is to haul around an entire kitchen of equipment and the food that goes with it.” U

In spite of the freedom of setting your own hours, avoiding office politics and working in your slippers, a home office has its downsides. Where to meet customers for those appointments that you can’t schedule at the corner café? How to combat the isolation of being alone all day? Co-working offices – places that try to answer these questions by providing independent workers and entrepreneurs with the space and utilities of a conventional office (think meeting rooms and copy machines, for starters) while letting them keep their autonomy. Though few rules apply, these spaces generally apply the ethos of a social co-op to the business world. “It’s a bit like having roommates,” says Station C co-founder Patrick Tanguay. We check out four spaces across Canada, from an incubator for entrepreneurs in Vancouver to an office in Toronto’s Chinatown, that share not just spaces, but also ideas.

Desk jockeys in the airy office of the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto

The Centre for Social Innovation (CSI), Toronto
What it is: Working and meeting space for about 180 organizations and freelancers with a social mission in a renovated factory warehouse in Toronto’s Chinatown. The building is as progressive as its members: along with indoor bicycle parking and a rooftop garden, the offices have solar water heating and even a biowall. Members include the David Suzuki Foundation, design firms such as BFdesign and media companies such as Spacing magazine.
How it works: Events are held throughout the year, but the best catalyst for collaboration between members remains informal chitchats. “It’s a really stimulating environment,” says tenant Chris Appleton, who works with design firm the Movement. “You might have a conversation in the kitchen that might lead to a collaboration project.” Joint initiatives include Jane’s Walk, a North America-wide event to promote walkable neighbourhoods.
What it costs: Membership packages range from $25 for a one-time pass to $75 per month for access to a shared workstation to up to $1,800 a month for a dedicated office.

Station C in Montreal

Station C, Montreal
What it is: A 2,500-square-foot loft with 19 workstations and three meeting rooms in Montreal’s trendy Mile End district.
How it works: It’s not all business; Station C handpicks members to create a friendly, social atmosphere. Though there most members are male and most work in the web industry, co-founder Patrick Tanguay hopes to improve the selection process as the space receives more applications.
What it costs: $350 a month for a desk, $250 to used a shared workstation and $3 an hour for non-members.

NEXT PAGE: A future home for Calgary freelancers and an entrepreneur’s dream office in Vancouver.

In the 18 years since Smart Technologies introduced its first interactive whiteboard, the company has gone from market obscurity (this was before everyone and their grandmother had a PDA, remember) to impressive market reach (175 countries and counting). Want to book a meeting with a colleague in Malaysia? No problem. After an early hook-up with Intel Corp., Smart Technologies has gone from one interactive whiteboard to an ever-expanding line of hardware, software and services.

But like the education, private business and government offices at which their products are targeted, they needed to find a better way to collaborate: the headquarters were in seven buildings scattered across Calgary. The company recently moved into a new global HQ that gives new meaning to the word collaboration, with more than 90 conference rooms (including one-person rooms where you can make phone calls and a glass-walled dining hall that doubles as a large meeting space). They’ve also tweaked the metrics of your typical office. Most workplaces have 80 per cent private space and 20 per cent shared space. Smart Tech new digs up that ratio to 60/40.

Linda Thomas, the vice-president of marketing, deconstructs Smart’s Extreme Collaboration Room, which she calls a “living lab” to test how clients might use the space.

Photo by John Gaucher

1. People can touch the board, write on it and share, store and email digital notes. The software recognizes the ink as a digital object, like a picture is in a Microsoft Word document. You walk up to that board – which could be projecting a diagram, chart, spreadsheet, anything really – pick up a pen and eraser from the pen tray and circle or cross out other people’s comments. The next time a person opens the document they’ll see your digital ink. You can also use your finger as a mouse to interact with the data.

2. A typical room has two interactive whiteboard systems with a board and projector that act as an integrated system. This room has eight of these systems. It’s great for any type of work situation where there is a lot of information and you want a visual of it all. It’s used heavily by our product development team.

3. Screen-sharing software lets you see thumbnails of all the eight screens at the same time. The information on that screen can be sent to any of the other screens in the room, or you can click on one screen to make it bigger and use it to navigate to others. It’s useful when you have a lot of information displayed at once.

4. The integrated projectors eliminate shadows so people can use the boards without interfering with the display.

5. I can look at the same screen in this room as someone looking at it in our Ottawa assembly facility in, honestly, 10 seconds. One of our customers had their Smart Boards on 24/7 and connected via video conferencing so that the team in the UK could see when people showed up and began working in their office in India. It creates a sense of teamwork by providing a closer in-person experience than talking on the telephone or flipping through PowerPoint presentation.

6. The absence of furniture encourages people to share their ideas at the board, walk around and talk to each other. Walking creates a more energizing environment than people sitting around a table staring at frames. We didn’t find it anywhere in formal research, it was something we thought, “You know what? This would be an interesting way to encourage collaboration.” U

More Great Spaces
Writer Malwina Gudowska and photographer John Gaucher take a curated tour of Smart Technologies and three other companies that reimagine the office.