Careers going slash is not exactly news (Fast Company recently dubbed the same phenomenon ‘Generation Flux’ in a fascinating series of articles) but one corollary of this shift is just getting started — the slash space. The boundaries between our different identities are blurring in time as many more of us work flexibly at multiple gigs or projects throughout the year, week or even day, and it seems the hard lines between spaces for work, family and play are also becoming less stark.

At least that’s what a spate of innovative new space ideas that blur personal and professional space begins to suggest. In Europe, for example, Regus and other flexible office space companies are tucking workspaces into transport hubs to cater to a more location independent, office hours agnostic work style. Reuters reports:

Regus… is opening 15 on-platform railway business lounges in the Netherlands, 60 to 100 in France, and more in Switzerland and Germany. Regus is looking to do the same in shopping malls in the U.S and Shell service stations globally. The firm’s first motorway-flanking office opened in January in France on the A10 Autoroute’s Limours-Janvry service station.

In Britain, The Office Group has signed a deal to open five drop-in offices at railway stations, starting with London Paddington in September.

But it’s not just the railway station/office that’s going slash. How about coworking/daycare? Forget leaving your personal commitments at the door as you head out to the office, Plug & Play, a new coworking space in Austin, Texas is offering freelancers, entrepreneurs and remote workers office space and childcare under one roof, allowing members to meet parental and professional obligations in one place.

Do you think we’ll see more hybrid spaces along these lines as the rigid boundaries of traditional office culture break down further? 

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The results of that research were published recently in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication in the form of a long and quite academic article (light reading, it is not) that tackles the seemingly simple question: What is coworking, and what do people get out of it? But, it turns out, the lived reality of coworking is not as tidy as Spinuzzi’s straightforward question. He got a bewildering set of contradictory answers from space owners:

Coworking space as community center. The proprietors of Soma Vida and Space12, mixed use spaces, told Spinuzzi that coworking as they all understood it was all about serving the local community. “The object was to work alongside, but not with, others. Consequently, both had quiet policies in their spaces,” writes Spinuzzi.

Coworking as collaboration space. If some spaces were all about offering community members peace and quiet, others insisted they were focused on creating a buzzy environment. Calling this type “the unoffice,” Spinuzzi notes spaces in this category, which includes Brainstorm, Link, and Perch, “encouraged discussions; interaction between the coworkers.” Spinuzzi summarizes the object of these spaces as recreating “characteristics of the traditional office environment that independent workers may miss.”

Some proprietors in this category even ruled the community center type of space out of the coworking movement entirely. “If a space had a no talking policy, ‘then it’s not coworking,’” Link’s Liz Elam told Spinuzzi.

Coworking as networking hub. Conjunctured, Cospace and GoLab Austin, “saw the mission of their coworking spaces as fostering more active connections between coworkers, connections that could lead to working relationships between businesses—contracts or referrals,” writes Spinuzzi. “Their focus was on entrepreneurship.”

He notes that while these spaces were as buzzy as so-called unoffice spaces, they were more focused on formal collaboration rather than informal connections and saw themselves as catalyzing the shift towards more independent work by allowing independent workers to clump together. “Proprietors saw these spaces as comprising a collocated network of potential contractors,” concludes Spinuzzi.

That’s how proprietors thought of their spaces. What did the actual coworkers within them tell Spinuzzi? “The coworkers I interviewed tended to emphasize the unoffice model, in particular, the combination of space and social interaction,” he says, but notes that they were far from in complete agreement about what they hoped to get out of coworking. “Some coworkers expected to work in parallel whereas others expected to work in cooperation,” he writes, noting different expectations for collaboration at coworking spaces.

The fundamental question, what is coworking then, is far from settled, and Spinuzzi isn’t expecting a single definitin to emerge anytime soon. “As cities become more porous and workers become more mobile, we can expect coworking and variations to multiply,” he writes. With larger companies looking at ways to adapt cowoking to their needs, and more corporate remote workers utilizing the spaces, things in fact may get a whole lot more complicated.

What’s your personal definition of coworking?

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Fred Hoch and Terry Howerton (left), cofounders of TechNexus.

When you’re young, it’s natural to think of grown ups as party-spoiling bores. But wait a few years until you’re a fellow adult and that uncool elder brother or once sedate seeming older cousin suddenly becomes fascinating and fun loving. Adults generally aren’t stodgy to other adults.

What has this got to do with tech and collaboration? A lot, according to Terry Howerton, co-founder of Chicago-area collaboration space and incubator TechNexus, which Forbes recently ranked as one of the top ten incubators in the country. In an interview with GigaOM, Howerton argues that rather than view big corporations as innovation killing, community destroying infiltrators into the startup or coworking playroom, it’s time for some segments of the tech industry to leave the garage and dorm room mentality behind and recognize that they’ve grown into big time players that can benefit from closer ties to large corporations.

What’s the history of TechNexus?

We created TechNexus as a collaboration center in 2007. The idea originally was not an incubator. We didn’t like that word.

What was your objection?

Five years ago many incubators were government subsidized or attached to an academic institution. Our feeling was that any time that government or academia funds an incubator, the success metrics of the incubator get really fungible really fast. What we were creating wasn’t going to be dependent on any kind of government money. It wasn’t going to be overly identified with any one academic institution, so that word incubator just didn’t resonate. We liked collaboration center and clubhouse.

Do you have an open door policy or do you actively curate the community?

There is an open door policy to an extent. We host lots of events and partner with 75 different community organizations and groups like the Illinois Technology Association, The Clean Energy Trust. It brings a lot of different people through. But the special sauce is curating that collaboration. It’s knowing who’s on the floor, how they create value for other people and connecting them up in meaningful ways.

So how did you end up becoming an incubator if that wasn’t what you set out to do?

Early on when we set out to build the collaboration center, we had startups who came in and said: ‘This is like ground zero for what I’m trying to do. All the right people are already coming through here. Would you mind if I had a desk here?’ And we said: ‘Sure, take a desk.’ Then we started providing a lot more mentorship and direct value for those companies that were resident. Today, to jump ahead, we’ve had 167 startups that have launched from the floor and they’ve raised about $80 million in capital and had about 500 employees. We didn’t set out to create an incubator, but we ended up creating the most successful incubator that Chicago has yet seen, and we did it by focusing on building the quality and the diversity of the community.

Who’s involved in TechNexus today?

Almost 3,000 people a month flow through TechNexus – entrepreneurs, engineers, executives, students, faculty. On average we have people who represent 900 different companies coming through every month.

What does the participation of corporations in the space add for the startups?

To me, one of the limitations of a lot of the accelerator and traditional incubator models is that the people in those programs tend to be very homogenous. They tend to look the same. They tend to be at the same stage. They tend to have the same background, the same experience levels.

We wanted to have a really heterogeneous community. If you wander around the floor at TechNexus on any given day, you’re just as likely to run into members of the Advanced Research Team at Motorola Mobility as you are to run into the founding team of a company called Open Kernel Labs, which has built software that is now in over a billion mobile devices worldwide but started on our floor four and a half years ago, as you are to run into a 17-year-old kid doing a startup for the first time. Having those three different people – the big corporate research team, the well established startup and the young, just-getting-off-the-ground mobile app developer — hanging out at the water cooler and working out in the gym and having us facilitating that collaboration, that’s a key part of our success.

Are you just focused on that informal interaction, or do you also have formal programs to catalyze collaboration between these groups?

There are workshops, roundtables and programs, and then with relation to specific startups, we get involved and, because of our position in the community, we connect them with the exact mentors that they need to talk to. We say, listen, we’re here for you. We’ll be in front of the white board with you. We’re going to go find people with experience of your specific problem because we can leverage our relationships and bring them in. Or we’re going to connect you up with the corporation who can help take you to market. So there are formal, structured events and then there is a more personalized program with mentorship and traditional incubation.

Do you think your approach is due in part to your location – does it reflect the fact that Chicago has such a diverse business scene as opposed to, say, Silicon Valley?

We’re very strong in financial services, in manufacturing, in real estate. A company like Archipelago, who thought of themselves as a financial services company, ended up merging with the New York Stock Exchange. But if we look at their history, we consider them to be a software company, a technology platform that transformed the way stocks are traded. Leveraging those kinds of verticals is something I think we can almost uniquely do here. Certainly you’re not doing that in Silicon Valley.

That also shapes the kind of companies that we tend to welcome into the incubator. I’m not necessarily a big fan of the social web, get as many consumer eyeballs as we can, try to figure out some business model somewhere down the road sort of thing. That capital efficient, digital startup model sounds attractive, but it’s tough for us to understand where the real value is in many of those companies. I am much more interested in working with companies that are going to transform industries and that can leverage those strong, diverse industries that exist here in Chicago to do that.

Do you have any examples of this type of synergy between startups and corporations at TechNexus?

The very first company that moved into our facility was a startup with three employees, one of those employees was the former CIO of Credit Suisse, another one was the former CTO of Borland Software. It’s a company called CohesiveFT. They make a server virtualization tool and have benefited through IBM’s participation in our ecosystem and going to market together with IBM.

Within the broader startup and coworking communities, there’s sometimes a feeling that corporations kill the mojo or squash community spirit. Is that a fear you’ve encountered before and, if so, what’s your reaction to it?

The front half of our floor is a coworking space. There is, however, a big difference between what we call coworking and what the majority of coworking facilities out there are. Most coworking facilities are not focused on making sure the individuals there are building something that can become a growth stage business. That’s all we want, so you’re not going to find the freelancers, the consultants. Our coworking facility is very startup centric.

Now to answer your question, we actually leverage corporations. We’re not talking about IBM or Motorola coming in dressed in their button down suits. This is the advanced research team, the cutting edgiest part of the corporation. And also we’re talking about the tech industry, so even if we’re dealing with a $50-75 million company, the vibe is still there. They still depend on innovation.

If you look at our space, we’re on the 15^th floor of 200 South Wacker, right across the street from the Sears Tower. This is big time corporate real estate. This is not the loft in the outer reaches of the business district where people can bring their dogs to work. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but when you talk to people not in tech, that’s their image of everybody in the tech industry. Our place is a little funky, but it’s still a floor in a high rise because we want to portray that this is an industry that has arrived. The technology industry – and I’m no longer just talking about capital efficient digital startups, I’m talking about some very large technology businesses – is one of the leading industries in Chicago and it’s time we recognized that. Why the hell shouldn’t we be downtown in the middle of the corporate world?

That reminds me of Marc Andreesen’s comment that software is eating the world and nearly every company is becoming a software company.

That brings us full circle back to why involve corporations. Technology is, at a rapidly increasing pace, driving all innovation. You can say JP Morgan Chase is a bank. You could also say JP Morgan Chase is an information company, a technology company.

Let’s talk about the value of TechNexus from a corporation’s perspective. Why would a corporation want to be involved?

The pace of innovation, of bringing products to market that are truly disruptive to existing industries, is faster today than ever before. Banking, insurance, stock trading, even real estate, most of the innovation that’s happening in those industries is being driven by tech. So big corporations are facing the need to innovate faster. And fast, agile and entrepreneurial are not words you generally associate this big corporations, right? That’s reason number one why corporations are now reaching out to TechNexus. They need access to our innovators. They don’t have enough of that in their DNA anymore.

Does participating in TechNexus offer corporations other benefits?

The traditional venture capital model, in my mind, is dead. If you look at institutional VCs for the last several years that money has been moving later stage and higher dollar. Institutional VCs have moved up market. At the same time, angels and angel networks have gotten way more sophisticated, certainly in Chicago. Introduce crowdfunding into the mix in a couple of years and it’s going to continue to transform the traditional VC industry in ways that put pressure on corporate venture.

If you had a small venture group inside of your corporation and you were tasked with trying to keep your eye out for the latest, greatest early stage technology for the company to maybe acquire or invest into, you no longer find yourself competing with institutional VCs but with angels, accelerators, incubators, maybe ultimately with 30 million Americans doing crowdfunding. That’s driving corporations into our ecosystem.

How are your relationships with your corporate partners structured – are they putting in money to support startups or paying for desk space or something else?

All of the above. They’re paying a program fee. For example, one of the things that we’ve done is establish relationships with young engineering talent coming out of university. We’ve spent the last several years buying kids pizza at Notre Dame, University of Illinois, University of Chicago, Purdue and others. We’ve got corporate partners who have said: ‘How do we get access to that talent?’

Take someone like Walgreens. Most people don’t think of them as a tech company, but Walgreens does $1.5 billion a year in ecommerce. How do they tell rock star development talent that they’re one of the biggest ecommerce companies and have one of the best mobile apps in the world?  It’s a sexier proposition to say: ‘Hey kids, come hang out at TechNexus and build technology that would be of interest to Walgreens.’ And, as a result, create a pipeline relationship.

What’s next for TechNexus?

We’ve done tons of mentorship and facilitated lots of different things. One of the things we’ve not done is played a significant role in investing our own capital, or even capital that we’re directing. We haven’t had a fund that’s attached to the incubator. That’s now happening. We’re seeing these corporations come forward and say, ‘help us direct our capital investments,’ so capital is become more and more available to us to put in to some of these startups.

Image courtesy of Terry Howerton. 

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Since its launch last September women’s career advice site The Daily Muse has been run  by a largely remote team. However, the company recently opted for a change, moving together into San Francisco coworking space StartupHQ. Rather than growing out of coworking, this is one startups that’s growing into one, and in a recent post for Forbes, the Daily Muse teams explain why, for them, coworking beats a remote arrangement. Besides a swankier kitchen and more opportunities for bonding, they explain that their new home base provides significant advantages:

You Cut Down on Email (a Lot). I love email as much as the next woman does, but sometimes it can get a little out of hand. I never realized how much email traffic was being generated just keeping people in the loop, until I could look up and share a thought or idea with the team instead of busting out my laptop. It’s also been easier to keep the whole team involved in projects (or at least aware of them) when we’re all in the same space.

Instant Sales Leads. We work in a space with dozens of other companies. By meeting them and learning about their products, we’ve started to do business with many of them. In some cases, we’ve become their clients (we now use Xero, a cloud accounting solution), and in others, our deskmates have wanted to work with us. If you offer services to other companies, co-working can be a great source of sales leads, and you really can’t beat in-person customer service over coffee.

New Ideas. Anyone who knows me knows that I like to brainstorm. But that’s a lot harder to do alone. Being around my team means that we can riff of each other’s ideas and generate new, and often better, ones. Co-working has allowed us to have more serendipitous moments, and to better integrate sales, marketing, and editorial initiatives.

The debate around whether remote set-ups and coworking spaces work well for startups at different stages in their growth will likely rage on (here’s more from the pro remote camp, and here’s more from the anti if you want to catch up), as it seems that different companies have strong and opposed positions on the matter.

Do you think the ideal set up for a startup is simply down to the preferences and locations of the team, or can you say categorically that remote, co-located or coworking is best? 

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Emily Maltby reports on a new style of jumbo spaces being set up to accommodate these larger startups, including the Cambridge Innovation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and RocketSpace Inc. in San Francisco:

In recent years, though, some new ventures have bucked the traditional model by creating pay-as-you-go setups for sizable start-ups.

Some of these spaces have vast, open floors that can be partitioned according to the size of a company, or enclosed offices with adjustable walls. And they often provide communal reception services, copiers and conference rooms—or even amenities like showers and massages.

Many entrepreneurs are turning to these spaces as a way to save on overhead as they expand, as well as maintain the communal feel of the business incubators where they launched their companies.

Though staying in communal space may be good for the budgets of these adolescent startups, and may be comforting to entrepreneurs used to the supportive community aspect of coworking, experts apparently warn their may also be downsides for businesses that fail to cut  the apron strings and move out on their own. These include, the “difficulty of keeping secrets from rivals. And some critics worry that coworking for too long may hinder businesses from developing an individual identity,” writes Maltby.

Other startups in the space stealing your employees could also be an issue. “You have human-resources issues…. I don’t want another company to romance my guys away,” George Deeb, founder of start-up consulting firm Red Rocket Partners, told the WSJ.

Should firms with dozens of employees rather than a handful stick with communal office space? 

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Do their expectations line up with those of freelancers and entrepreneurs? Do they get as much out of the coworking experience? The Second Global Coworking Survey aimed to answer these questions, with the results published recently in DeskMag.

The findings confirm that the number of employees working out of coworking spaces is steadily increasingly, currently making up about a third of coworking membership in the U.S. And it turns out these corporate coworkers come to their spaces with different problems and experience group working differently. Though all groups agree about some fundamentals – freelancers, entrepreneurs and employees are all satisfied with coworking at the same high rates, the survey found.

“Social networks are expanded, isolation is reduced and productivity increased – if not quite as markedly as the other two groups,” writes Carsten Foertsch of employee members in DeskMag. Everyone is satisfied and more plugged in, but the three groups focus on slightly different benefits of this sociability with entrepreneurs understandably more excited about the potential for interdisciplinary work, while freelancers, again unsurprisingly, see the highest gains in productivity.

What’s most the most important benefit for employees? This answer might comes as more of a shock. Despite usually having years of experience sharing offices with colleagues behind them, employees actually enjoy the social benefits of coworking more than other types of members. “Somewhat surprisingly, employees most often appreciate being a member of a community,” Foertsch reports. This is so even though they’re the least participatory members, making the least use of coworking space events.

Is there anything corporate types don’t like about coworking? The noise, apparently. “Volume… is an issue – with almost one in three bothered by the noise levels of the new workplace,” according to Foertsch, though unlike other types of coworkers, employees are content with spaces only opening during regular business hours.

All in all the results indicate that coworking is beneficial to corporate remote workers (though implying less than flattering things about the social vibe at most offices in the process) and offer no reason these three groups can’t play well together going forward. Even if corporate types aren’t the most actively engaged coworkers and are looking for slightly quieter facilities, it seems they’re fundamentally after the same things as independents and entrepreneurs.

Coworking space members, do all three groups agree on what they want from your coworking space?

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We tackled this question in relation to the coworking movement previously, soliciting opinions from space owners and users. Many of them argued that, though coworking spaces have a social element and stress togetherness and connection, the fact that the user sets their own level of contact, as opposed to having interactions dictated by a boss, means coworking provides a good balance of interaction and alone time for introverts.

But how about remote work itself, without considering coworking as a mediating factor – does work location independence further isolate the already socially distant or help them better modulate their level of connection? That’s the question an interesting post on Workshifting by Natalya Sabga tackled recently. In it Sagba focuses on her personal experience as an introverted “workshifter,” relating her ups and downs as she’s attempted to strike the right the balance between solitary work and social interaction:

I’ve been dipping my toes into the workshifting pool since 2009. It’s been an ideal set of circumstances for an introvert like me, as I work in a quiet space where I can control my daily dosage of interruption and interaction. Ideal, that is, until too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.

Introverts need interaction, too. That is just human nature 101… Introverts who work in a standard office setting get their daily dosage of interaction by default. Introverts who workshift have it harder – it’s too easy to focus on a project or assignment and forget that there is an external world that we need to be part of, too!

So, after basking in every introvert’s dream for the past three years, I realized that I needed some balance. Sometimes, my workdays are intense, and I really can only focus on work. I don’t fight my introverted habits on those days as that would adversely affect my productivity. Other days, when my schedule is lighter, I remind myself to explore new spaces to workshift from, make time to see friends or volunteer.

A couple of points are worth noting here. One is the danger that the ability to work from anywhere might enable more withdrawal than is healthy among introverts. While loneliness is an often-cited drawback of working from home, the idea that someone could like the alone time but suffer for it professionally and psychically in the longer-term is a subtly different point that’s worth bearing in mind.

The second aspect of Sabga’s post worth pondering is the fact that she has both the awareness to notice her own excess of solitude and the freedom, due to technological empowerment, to correct it. Too often, many have argued, we choose our work environment on autopilot and fail to both recognize the degree to which the location of our work affects us and manipulate how we work by manipulating where we work.

Do you think remote work presents special challenges for introverts?

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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?

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Suggestions for how to improve college differ, but all seem to revolve around the same central axis – pulling the ivory tower down a little bit closer to the teeming activity on the ground and tying the things we learn in the classroom more firmly to the work we hope to do in the world after graduation. Some coworking spaces think they can help accomplish this, offering new learning options in partnership with universities.

CoCo in Minneapolis, for example, recently launched a series of classes and workshops in design thinking taught by Stanford d.school professor Anna Love-Mickelson and following the curriculum of the California campus. They’ve dubbed the initiative d.school@CoCo. The thinking behind the offering is two-fold, according to Don Ball, the space’s founder. First, Ball believes that design thinking is like a vitamin that will supercharge the work of those at the space.

“Design thinking, like coworking, is a transformative phenomenon. It’s goal is to enable radical, rather than incremental change. We’re rebels at heart, so the idea of inciting disruptive change is really attractive,” he explained in an email. “We’ve always told ourselves that CoCo wasn’t just an alternative office space. How boring is that? It is a place for people to work on big ideas. With d.school@CoCo, we feel like we now have a language and way of thinking that could have large-scale impact beyond our own four walls.”

But d.school@CoCo isn’t just about giving members the tools to accomplish larger projects. It’s also about spreading the word about coworking to bigger organizations, again helping bring theory into contact with new worlds of practice. “We’ve always believed that coworking is a really big tent. It’s not just for freelancers and entrepreneurs. So, we’ve looked for ways to make this environment accessible to people from other realms. D.school@CoCo gives us a structured way to bring people from big organizations into our space and to get a taste of collaborative problem solving,” wrote Ball.

And CoCo isn’t the only space that thinks of itself not only as a place to plug in a laptop and share some water cooler chatter, but also a means to bridge the gap between classroom learning and real-world practice. In the same mold, Reno Collective has a partnership with the local University of Nevada Reynolds School of Journalism (RSJ). But rather than bringing the professor to the coworkers as at CoCo, in Reno they’re bringing eight grad students to the Collective by offering them free memberships for a semester. RSJ also offers workshops at the space.

Both the space owners and J-school faculty hope for synergy. “We have faculty and students who understand content but need help understanding the next step in content creation — how to make journalism more usable, accessible, scalable and findable. Reno Collective is full of enthusiastic people who fill a big gap for us in terms of understanding journalism as both process and product independent of a corporate news institution,” said Donica Mensing, a professor at RSJ. “We also see a coworking space as a safe place for our students to land after they’ve graduated. They can get support from other freelancers, consultants and small business owners who use the space,” she added.

And while the school’s presence at the coworking space adds real-world practicality to the theory of the classroom, the knowledge that flows from the university can assist wizened freelancing veterans working at the space, according to Colin Loretz, founder of Reno Collective. “We have a tremendous amount of latent talent in the area and we see an opportunity in being able to help people take theoretical knowledge and apply it to much more real-world situations,” Lorentz says. To this end, the members also teach each other. “Everyone who has a hand in running the coworking space or teaching a class, does something else for a living and is a master of their own craft so we are able to deliver classes on the bleeding edge of the industries and technologies we focus on,” he said.

The future of work may be hazy (what aspect of the future isn’t?) but certain broad themes seem clear. Fast-paced careers will demand lifelong learning. And as knowledge-based jobs increasingly come to the fore, innovation and the engagement and integration of all aspects of the self that drive it will be more valued, an artificial separation between personal passions and daily work more of a liability. Both trends suggest that these coworking spaces may be on to something by bringing education closer to work and making it an ongoing process.

How do you think the future of work is going to shape the future of education?

Image courtesy of Flickr user eliza|O.

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Not exactly, if a recent report on NPR is to be believed. The story by Kaomi Goetz for Morning Edition looks at the evolving coworking movement and suggests some spaces are getting far pickier about who they admit as members. “More companies are adopting a selective approach known as ‘curated coworking,’” says Goetz, offering Grind in New York as an example.

Joining the space is no simple matter of filling out a brief form and handing over your credit card. “If you write two words and two sentences [on your application], you’re probably not going to hear from me. But if you write two pages about why you want to work at Grind, I will bring you in for an interview,”explains Benjamin Dyett, a Grind co-founder who Goetz describes as the “company’s chief gatekeeper.”

But getting past the coworking velvet rope isn’t a matter of coolness or what you have to contribute to the networking pool, Dyett insists, but serves a nobler purpose. “None of it is to be elitist and exclusive. It is to create a strong, cohesive community,” he told Goetz. Whatever the exact reason for the somewhat arduous selection process, it’s not turning off potential members – the space has a waiting list of 100. Meanwhile, Loosecubes‘ Campbell McKellar says the app also vets potential members for fit, likening the process to dating. “There could be 10 men in Brooklyn that have brown hair that are in my age range, but I really would only like one, for reasons that are very hard to describe. It’s about chemistry,” McKellar says.

So what does the changing process for seeking admission to spaces say about the coworking movement? In one way it’s good news as it shows spaces are maturing and making money, and are able to turn away potential paying customers. Others might object that the practice is leading the movement away from its communitarian roots by creating a cool kids club, indicating a scene that’s left its heady early days and moved into a more mature, less idealistic (perhaps less fun) phase.

How does this more intense vetting of potential coworking space members strike you? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user JeffMaysh.

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