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 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.

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.

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 socializing and events. Bars in offices are apparently going to be a thing.

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.

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.

If socializing 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.

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 drunkards. In reality, pragmatic considerations-how much time is left on the lease, the physical constraints of a buildings layout, uncertainty about the path of the pandemic-will determine the pace of change. Whatever happens, the office won't be what it was.