My Camino came with extras that were not included in the Sydney pilgrimage: I got postcards. One of these was from when I arrived at Pamplona and, allegedly, I had a go at running with the bulls. A postcard, or better said a digital image of a postcard, arrived by email each time I accumulated the number of kilometres that warranted one.

A great deal of attention was paid to recreating the necessary ornamental cues of a real-world postcard in the digital card. For example, stamps were of course unnecessary, but my digital postcard still had them, and they showed the imperfections that real stamps have, and the card was written using a computer font mimicking cursive handwriting. The card itself showed marks of wear and tear with tattered corners and scars from a long journey at the hands of international postal services.

My digital postcards were a skeuomorphism, a mouthful of a word for a simple but fascinating concept: to give an object (digital or analogue) the necessary properties of the original object it tries to represent. The goal is for the imitation to inherit the familiarity and evoke similar emotions as the original. This process requires knowledge of the key characteristics of the original object to appropriately convey essence, and then it must discover ways to transfer those into the new object.

Twelve years before I received my virtual postcard from Pamplona, I got on a plane and flew to the opposite side of the world. It was 2008, a time when disciplines like sociology, economics, you name it, had developed a peak interest in virtual worlds as a way to further their studies [64]. This interest was shared by architecture – after all, it’s easier, faster, and cheaper to design, build, and maintain a building in a virtual world than the real world [65]. It wasn’t long before organisations began experimenting with virtual environments for work related activities.

Amongst this hype I travelled to Manchester, UK, to study an early adopter of Second Life, a popular virtual world at the time. The organisation’s real-world office featured rows of desks with a corridor along one side and windows along the other. All of this was sandwiched between a suspended acoustic tile ceiling and a grey carpet. In other words, a typical open plan office.

On the other hand, the company’s Second Life workplace was a glass sphere floating over the sea, Fig. 26.1. The organisation’s metaphorical consistency, in particular its real-world physics, was quite sophisticated. However, when it came to model the work environment, they mimicked its real-world equivalent as closely as they could – just like my postcard from Pamplona.

Fig. 26.1
figure 1

Sketch of Second Life office

Full size image

A floating glass sphere in the middle of the ocean? Not a problem. Interacting online in an environment that doesn’t mimic the real world… well, that was problematic.

What I like about our [Virtual] office is that it is the opposite of replicating a real-world office, but still has very good functionality. It has meeting space and presentation areas. So there are some good practical office uses, within an innovative environment. (Managing Director [1])

Virtual worlds struggled to shake off their gaming origins. They were seen as gimmicky and a very real digital apocalypse in 2012 wiped out many of them [66]. But some worlds survived, including Second Life which has revamped their virtual working offer under the slogan “Remote Work Redefined” [67].

A clear lesson from the pandemic was that regardless of the significantly improved interface of virtual worlds, remote work, or rather meetings, overwhelmingly moved to video conferencing platforms, not to virtual worlds.

FormalPara Irving and the Metaverse

The initial excitement and hopes set upon virtual worlds of old are now being rebadged into the metaverse [68] and I am excited to see this new meta-skeuomorphism. But as we start to build new worlds and new versions of ourselves in them, I worry about what we might leave behind, in particular I’m concerned about Irving.

When the Chicago-based Vienna Sausage Company moved to a new plant, their sausages lost their distinct red colour and signature snap [69]. The company retained the same recipe, ingredients, and process, but once they moved into a purposely designed, state-of-the-art new facility, their sausages came out pink and snap-less.

They pondered their conundrum and finally remembered Irving, a well-loved employee who transported the sausages through the jumble of the old plant to the smoke house. The trip through the mazes of the previously unplanned facility allowed the sausages to cool and acquire their distinctive colour and consistency.

“The new plant had no jumbled maze. It was the very model of efficiency”, reflected the Chairman of the Vienna Sausage Company [69].

As we face opportunities to create new worlds of work in the Metaverse, or new configurations in the real world, we must be mindful not to leave behind ‘Irvings’ and other aspects of work that may seem inefficient but deliver competitive advantages.

Despite falling short in meeting their high expectations, virtual worlds left me searching for cues that communicate the essence of work – and produced another signpost:

figure a

The outcome of this signpost would be a list of useful attributes of what makes a workplace. Useful no doubt, but also incomplete because of a shortcoming which goes back to the difficulty of defining what work is. This is so difficult that some, starting with Aristotle, found it easier to define work not by what it is, but by what it’s not [70]. For example, work is that which is not leisure.

The point here is that an essential quality of a workplace is also what it is not – a point that it’s also a signpost:

figure b

Therefore, the workplace needs not only to satisfy its own list of requirements, it must also manage those of other domains it might be in conflict with. Theories from work and family life-balance [71] suggest people have developed different ways to integrate, or segment, these two domains by creating, managing, and crossing the border. While some might work happily on a laptop at the dining table, others might not have walls at home thick enough, physically or metaphorically, to create the segmentation they need.

Engulfed in endless debates on the benefits of open plan office layouts, designers overlooked exploring the design implications of working from home (WFH), mostly reducing the topic to satisfying technical requirements of working at home: a fast Internet connection, a reliable video conferencing application, and a good file sharing system. However, these items support tasks, not work.

More importantly, the workplace (the place where people work) doesn’t cease to exist when people stop going to the office and start working from home – if anything the workplace multiplies.

An assumption many make when thinking about the workplace is equating it with the office. However, the office is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of work. An invention of sorts which came out of a complex economic, social and technology context [1, 72]. Historically, work was done elsewhere including homes; and even when offices were developing as places of work, some people still chose to WFH. For example, banking dynasties in the nineteenth century such as the Rothschilds and Barings opted to operate from luxurious homes [73], not to spare a commute, but to make their clients feel at ease.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given us the opportunity, if not responsibility, to consider home as a proper workplace – once again.

As soon as I entered the last kilometres of my virtual Camino, an email with digital certificates of completion arrived in three formats: square, portrait, and landscape. They were formatted to suit social media platforms so that I could “show them off” however I wanted. These certificates were a great skeuomorphism, they digitally communicated the essence of achievement from the tiered twirly embossed seals on fancy paper of old.