Open Office Interior Designs in UAE: Good Trend or Standard?

Contrary to popular belief, cubic offices aren’t always the best option for maximizing collaboration and communication between employees or a workforce, as cubed offices shut down any external interaction, making a lot harder to communicate in that environment, more on that you can read here. Open interior designs serve more than just communication, they avoid spaces and the claustrophobic feeling of being stuck in an office.

What are open offices interior design?

Any open space with workers that working in it, with no physical barrier can summarized as an open office, in essence, a total opposite to Cubicles. Open offices promote teamwork, companionship, and support from other employees as it doesn’t close you off from the rest of the office as cubicles do.

There are many different variations of open offices, some are semi-open, with both privacy and an open layout, and others are completely open, with almost no privacy.

The most common open office practice is to arrange long rectangular tables and put on the necessary equipment there, depending if your office is traditional or more technology-themed; after that, parallel chairs are all there is to making a regular open office interior design. If you want you can go overboard and design it to the peak of your interior design dreams but a rectangular long and wide table with necessary equipment and dividers in between is quite enough.

History of Open Office interior designs

The open office layout or more commonly known as Open-Plan Layout founded in Germany and used to known as Bürolandschaft, It invented as a counterpart to avoid hierarchy systems in the offices to idealize and reflect the after-war equalitarianism trend in Germany.

The architects and the interior designers wanted to make a place where the employees could communicate and evolve rather than shut themselves down in an office for the entire day and not interact with others, as a result, the Open Office interior design came into existence.

How did Open Office Layout come into the trend?

Open office interior design started coming in trend all over the world after major corporations like Google and Facebook started adapting it into their offices, other medium and small enterprises started following to appear as innovative and forward as Google and Facebook.

After that, it is still in trend, but it is a close tie with cubicles because they promote more privacy and a focused work environment, on the other end open offices promote collaboration and teamwork.

By 2015 when Facebook opened its major office in California, spanning a wide and extravagant distance of 430,000 Square meters to accommodate over 2000 employees, it hit the nail in the coffin as it boosted the trendiness of open offices by a long shot.

Either way, offices were falling out of trend by the end of the 1960s open as people became more privacy-paranoid and everyone wanted some kind of enclosed space to be more focused and work efficient in their proceedings daily.

When did they come in trend?

Open office interior design hit their trendy peak in 3 different time frames, in 2005 because of Google, then again in 2015 because of Facebook, and now in 2020 because of major corporations adapting to a diverse and lenient workforce environment.

Opting in for bespoke furniture and company-themed offices is becoming the new hot thing these days or having slogan-specific company interiors to incorporate more branding into it such as “Dinosaurs make the best bagels, as their tiny sleezy T-rex arms are best at rolling the dough” or Nike’s “Just do it” or KFC’s “it’s Finger-Lickin’ Good”.

As the number of employees increases day by day, the number of different versions of offices; cubicles, open offices, or a hybrid will keep on increasing. It is a prevalent business in Interior Design and many do not see it stopping anytime soon.

Open Office interior design in UAE?

There is no prevalent office standard in UAE, as UAE is a home to over 200 nationalities, it brings culture and tradition from all over the world, which means no set or define standard for offices, and different cultures and people used to various and unique office environments.

So mostly hybrid offices are at their peak in UAE, while it is a tie between open offices and cubicles, open offices do seem to take the win in some places because of their innovative and more creative design capabilities and approach to more tech-involved offices as well.

As the world becomes more tech-dependent it is of no surprise that businesses will be opting for open offices as they are the best for now to blend and merge in with technical equipment such as computers, tablets, printers, etc. It also helps with the temperature as well, read more about it here.

Conclusion

Open offices provide teamwork and compatibility with various other things, with some disadvantages of privacy. It evolved and invented in Germany following the post-war movement to disarm any hierarchal systems of administration. It came into a trend after Facebook and Google adapted it in their offices. In the UAE over 200 nationalities reside, and there is no “one for all” office design as everyone is unique, so a hybrid of all is more prevalent here.