I have known what freelancing full-time is like, where you don’t get the luxury of brainstorming with other creative minds and that isolation can be counter-productive sometimes. Coworking spaces may fix this. Besides, I guess that you can save a lot and work better in a coworking space, than your signature cafe – and the distractions are much more less as well. What’s great about this new setup too is that you get to meet like minds, where you can share your ideas without the fear of being ridiculed by your boss or colleagues in the usual office setting. It’s a win-win for me, I’d say!

From what we could gather when we were researching for ‘Working in the UnOffice’ (CoworkingGuide.com), coworking is still very much a business model in flux. And with all this attention it’s starting to get, we predict it’s going to be not so much a term to describe a space (i.e. joining a space) but rather a term to describe a way of working.

Even well-established companies are taking ideas straight out of the coworking playbook, looking to create more collaborative working environments. Smaller, brick-and-mortar businesses that may not necessarily be able to join their local coworking space are opening their doors to freelancers and small teams (wonderfully, companies like Loosecubes and Deskwanted are helping make that happen!). They bring people in as a way to spark new ideas and new connections.

We hope that going mainstream will expand awareness of coworking and the principles it espouses because it could vastly improve the productivity and experience of all types of workers– not just independent professionals.

The only caveat is that going mainstream might have the side effect of creating artificially what usually develops organically in a space: the community. Community and the environment it creates are the core fundamentals to making coworking work!

It has to be authentic, not manufactured.

-Genevieve