If you buy this argument that many types of public spaces are converging on this coffee-shop-like future, then perhaps the latest development in the evolution of coworking won’t surprise you. If both work spaces and shopping spaces are becoming more like coffee shops, why not have them occupy the same space?

That’s what a handful of design and home furnishing stores are doing, inviting coworkers into their tastefully designed showrooms to work. Konzepp, a concept store in Hong Kong, combines the functions of boutique, events space, cafe and coworking space, while in Texas District Workplace coworking has set up shop in Austin Business Furniture. In Hawaii, The Box Jelly coworking makes its home in furnishings store fishcake.

The concept, as Shareable’s Beth Buczynski points out, is clearly an effort by furniture sellers to understand and market themselves to the growing coworking movement. Buczynski writes:

Every work space, whether it’s a large coworking facility or a home office, needs chairs, desks, tables, lamps, file cabinets, and various other tools of the trade. Office furniture companies want to meet those needs, and several have discovered that coworking is a great way to gain exposure among the independent workforce.

“Over the past several years I’ve had the opportunity to meet with most of the major furniture providers: Haworth, Herman Miller and Steelcase,” said Mark Gilbreath, founder and CEO of LiquidSpace. “They are all quite aware of the coworking movement, so no surprise to see them dipping their toes into the water. It’s a natural thing for them to do as they observe changes in the work behaviors of their major corporate clients (eg steady shift toward mobility) and seek to apply their knowledge of what makes for a great/productive/healthy/high performance space to the new places where work happens.”

Steelcase has taken a number of experimental steps to understand this new world. They’ve operated Workspring in Chicago for 2+ years (not a coworking space, but an incredibly cool collaborative workspace that can be booked for off-site collaborative meetings) and also operate the 654 Crowswell coworking space in Grand Rapids Michigan

Unsurprisingly given the communitarian leanings of Shareable (the hint is in the title), Buzcsynski advocates welcoming retailers to the coworking fold. “Are businesses advancing their own agenda by offering space to coworkers at no charge? Absolutely. But the onus is on the coworking movement to respond in the spirit of collaboration and community. These values minimize competition and nurture the health of small businesses and local economies. If non-coworking businesses understand those goals and want to lend a hand in their own unique way, why exclude them?” she concludes.

But others in the movement are more skeptical about the interest from retailers, suggesting that their participation in the scene could dilute the spirit of community support that coworking strives for. “It is pretty clear that coworking is the afterthought not the focus,” Liz Elam, founder of Link Coworking in Austin and producer of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, says of these retailers-slash-space providers. “It’s like people working in hotel lobbies. It’s not the primary business and I think you would always feel like a squatter,” she says.

Should coworking fans welcome retailers with open arms or regard them with suspicion?

Image courtesy of Flickr user yutaka-f.

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Not according to a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research. To investigate the link between creativity and noise levels, researchers asked 300 participants to complete mental exercises like word association games and dreaming up as many ways as possible to use a brick while in environments that were either totally silent, moderately buzzing or straight up loud.

The results show that those who worked in moderately noisy environments with sound levels on par with your average bustling cafe (about 70 decibels) scored higher on these tests of creativity and were also rated as more innovative by other participants. The WSJ Ideas Market blog sums up the findings:

The study adds to research suggesting that small doses of distraction — including hard-to-read fonts — prompt the mind to work at a more abstract level, which is also a more creative level. (The possibility that sound energized people was considered but rejected: Participants’ heart rates did rise when they first encountered noise, but soon subsided.)  The effect of noise is inverted-U-shaped, this study suggested: There’s a sweet spot between silence and din.

That’s good news if we’re soon to be doing everything from studying to buying socks in a coffee-shop-like environment.

Do you find you’re more creative in a moderately noisy, buzzing environment?

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Which is why WorkSnug, which helps mobile workers find the best available work spaces near them, launched their ‘Coffee Shop Code of Conduct.’ Holding out the prize of 10 new smartphones and headsets for the most popular ideas, WorkSnug solicited coffeehouse denizens to offer up their top coffee shop pet peeves and vote on others’ suggestions. More than 6,000 heeded the call to complain (and hopefully help shape up the behavior of the digital nomad community).

We encouraged you to gripe about your top annoyances, now we’re reporting the results, presented in a handy infographic by WorkSnug:

Which coffee house sin is the worst in your book? The most frequently committed?

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And what about the special plight of the coffee shop-dwelling, laptop-toting, mobile worker? Free range workers who conduct their business out in public face a whole host of new issues, from how many coffees to order to keep the wait staff happy, to how quiet to keep your calls in aid of your fellow workers’ concentration. The rules are under construction, and there’s no consensus on what constitutes good manners.

Sticky conundrums and confusion abound, so WorkSnug, a tool to help mobile workers find work spaces nearby, is crowdsourcing tips and suggestions to keep everyone content and companionable working together in coffee shops.

To participate in their “Coffee Shop Worker Code of Conduct,” just go to their website by the end of October and suggest your own rules of good behavior for remote workers, or vote on which ideas others have submitted you like best. To get you thinking, the current top 10 includes not yelling like you’re on a construction site, not hogging electrical sockets (you know who you are, and you should be ashamed) and helping to promote the coffee shops you frequent.

“The whole company is based on a pet peeve, frankly,” explained coffee shop veteran and WorkSnug founder Richard Leyland. “There wasn’t a central reviews-base of places that are the best to go. It’s not much of an extension to think, well, what are the rules of etiquette?”

So express yourself over on WorkSnug, and we’ll be posting the final results here on WebWorkerDaily once they’re out in early November. If your idea makes it into the top 10, you win a Plantronics Discovery 975 headset and an ultra-compact Nokia E6 QWERTY and touch-screen smartphone. And maybe your fellow coffee shop denizens will even cut out some of their most annoying behavior.

What’s your coffee shop etiquette pet peeve?

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An experiment discussed in this post from New Scientist showed that the caffeine in coffee improves short-term memory and reaction times. Memory tests were carried out where half the participants received caffeine, while the other half received a placebo. According to researcher Florian Koppelstätter, “… those who received caffeine had significantly greater activation in parts of the prefrontal lobe, known as the anterior cingulate and the anterior cingulate gyrus. These areas are involved in ‘executive memory’, attention, concentration, planning and monitoring.”

Caffeine also seems to slow down the decline of glucose in the blood during physical exercise, which allows us to keep going longer without tiring. Also, if you’re suffering from lack of sleep or feel stressed, moderate doses of caffeine (around 200mg, or two cups of coffee) can alleviate the negative effects.

But caffeine intake also has its disadvantages. For example, while coffee improves your mental functions, it also leads you to be more open to persuasion. Later studies also suggest that most of these positive effects on memory, alertness, and energy are only seen in people who already have a regular intake of caffeine — not in those who rarely or never take the drug. In other words, it’s likely that these positive effects are merely a result of relieving caffeine withdrawal. In addition to that, some researchers say that caffeine is addicting enough for these withdrawals to sometimes be classified as a disorder.

What does this all mean for caffeinated web workers? Well, just like anything else you consume, it’s important to read up on the benefits and disadvantages of maintaining a caffeine habit. Caffeine isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re susceptible to getting addicted it can easily be abused.

If you find that you’re going to take in caffeine anyway, it’s probably best to skip that tall coffee mug in the morning and just take it in small doses throughout the day. According to this article from Wired, this will keep you more consistently alert during the day.

Do you regularly take in caffeinated drinks? How does it affect your work?

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More Than Just Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is crucial to a web worker’s ability to work on the road, but just knowing a that your local library branch offers free Wi-Fi isn’t enough to tell you that it’s a great workspace. Knowing how good the Wi-Fi is will tell you how much work you’ll be able to get done, especially if you’re working on something that requires a lot of bandwidth. If you’re working in a coffee shop when someone has to reboot the router every hour or in a co-working space where everyone is a heavy Internet user, you may not be able to get the kind of access you need for your work. Unfortunately, it can be hard to figure out the status of the Wi-Fi until you sit down and turn on your computer. It may be worth booting up and trying it out before you settle in for the long haul.

Depending on how long you plan to work, you may also need an electrical outlet to plug your laptop into. You’ll find different policies on just outlet usage, depending on where you go to work: at most chain coffee shops, there are at least a few outlets that customers can use. In some independent coffee shops, though, it’s becoming more common to find outlets taped over, unavailable for your use. Keep an eye out for accessible power on your way in — if you look around and there are no outlets you can use, it may be time to move on to the next place on your list.

Think Ergonomically

When you’re choosing a place to work, it’s important to make sure that you can sit comfortably for a long period of time. If you wind up hunched over your laptop, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, it’s much harder to get work done than if you find a comfortable chair that allows you to easily reach your laptop. Being able to use a table can make a big difference in how comfortable a workspace is, but other factors can be more personal. Look for chairs and arrangements that match your own preferences for comfort.

Coworking spaces can often provide a step above other options when it comes to comfort. Coworking spaces are usually designed from the ground up to provide guests with a place to get their work done, as opposed to a restaurant that may want to encourage customers to move along so new customers can sit down.

The Cost of the Workspace

Despite the fact that some people view being mobile as a way to avoid paying for office space, there are still costs associated with going into a coffee shop and sitting down. You’ll order at least a cup of coffee, and most people consider it polite to keep ordering food and drinks as long as they are taking up a table. A library may have no cost associated with using it as a workspace, but the library staff may ask you to limit your time if there’s a lot of demand at a given time. A coworking space will have an upfront fee.

It’s important to consider the cost of working at a particular location. Even if such expenses are tax deductible (remember to keep receipts!) they can quickly add up.

What do you look for in your mobile workspaces?

Photo credit: Flickr user theregeneration

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Photo by Reid Beels

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is put a kettle of water on the stove to make tea. Unlike Captain Picard’s preference for Earl Grey, I stick mostly to green tea to keep me caffeinated. I suspect that most of you have a similar ritual whether you reach for your morning Mt. Dew, tea, coffee, espresso, or a tall, skinny, half-caf, no whip, caramel machiatto from the local coffee shop.

The western obsession with caffeine has some interesting roots. On the NPR Science Friday podcast this week, Steven Johnson talked about how Age of Enlightenment in England coincides with the arrival of caffeine and the growing popularity of coffee shops as places where people with different backgrounds, like Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, came together over coffee and tea to talk about issues and new ideas. The coffee houses also introduced caffeine as a daily habit in people’s lives. At the time, one of the only other safe beverages was alcohol, since the water quality was poor, so some people went from being drunk by mid-morning every day to being caffeinated and alert throughout the day.

The collaborative history of coffee and tea is also interesting, particularly to web workers. Many of us spend our days working in home offices and other places with few people, but the local coffee shop can provide an alternative where we can meet people with diverse interests and different backgrounds. I have a couple of local coffee shops where other web workers tend to gather during the day, and I’ve found myself in interesting conversations with people who work in areas very different from my own. For example, earlier this week, I had an interesting discussion about podcasting with a couple of friends where we were sharing ideas and tips for hosting our video podcasts. I recently had a discussion with another friend about consuming RSS feeds within location based tracking applications.

In many ways, applications like Twitter and FriendFeed are allowing us to have similar cross-discipline discussions with interesting people online acting as at least a partial replacement for the coffee shop. I run across so many links and new technologies as a result of friends posting about them that I would have most likely missed without these applications.

These cross-discipline discussions can inspire new ideas and innovation, just like a science podcast about the invention of air inspired me to write this blog post for web workers.

What are your thoughts on coffee shops as a shared space for interesting discussions? What role does caffeine play in your life as a web worker? What would society be like if caffeine ceased to exist tomorrow?

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There have been many posts about engaging with coworkers and clients via Twitter, IM, Facebook, and other social networking sites. Those are a great first step to keep in touch with real people throughout the day, but what about those times when you just need to get out of the house?

I’m lucky to live here in Portland where we have a large number of freelancers, consultants, telecommuters, and other remote workers. We frequently get together during the week for coworking sessions at coffee shops where we each work independently, but by meeting in groups, we have people to watch our computers when we go to the bathroom, share quick stories, or get feedback on a tough issue. There are a few coffee shops where my web worker friends regularly congregate, and I can almost guarantee that I’ll see someone I know wander in during my visit.

If you aren’t lucky enough to have something similar already, consider scheduling it. How about coffee shop Wednesday? Pick a few friends who are also busy and who know that the purpose of the day is work (not chatting), and then find a place with solid wireless and caffeinated beverages. I typically save up those tasks that don’t require extensive concentration (responding to email, proposals, contracts, etc.), since you might not do your best strategic recommendations with the distractions of a coffee shop.

Beer and Blog Geek Meetups

photo used with permission from Aaron Hockley.

I also rely on attending regular events where I can interact with people who have similar technology interests. In some cases, I attend events that already exist. Here in Portland, we have events like Beer and Blog, Portland Web Innovators, and many user groups. I also noticed a few gaps, which I filled by working with other people to help start new groups like the Online Community Manager Meetup and PDX GeekChix. Attending existing events and starting new ones is a great way to meet new people and increase your interactions with other human beings offline.

What do you do when you crave human interaction during the work day?

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