This is what Dutch futurist Chriet Titulaer said in the Dutch daily, the NRC, in 1992: "An office without a 'network' will no longer exist. Absence in the office will become the standard ... In the office of the future, employees will be absent for half their working time. They will work at home on their ‘tele-workplace’, which is connected via a fiber optic cable to the 'network' in the office ... Telecommuting is currently still a fairly primitive matter, because communication uses the normal telephone connection. We show what telecommuting in the 20th century can be, with color and image connections and the like, in an external workplace that is fully connected to the network.’ The man was once again way ahead of his time.
Already in 1980 Alvin Toffler wrote in this book The Third Wave about 'electronic cottages' from which prosumers will shape local and global markets: ‘one change is so potentially revolutionary, and so alien to our experience [is] the shift of work out of the office and factory and back into the home ... many people may soon be working at home anyway in the electronic cottages of tomorrow ... many of the same electronic devices we will use in the home to do work for pay will also make it possible to produce goods or services for our own use. In this system the prosumer, who dominated in First Wave societies, is brought back into the center of economic action— but on a Third Wave, high- technology basis. In short, whether we look at self-help movements, do-it-yourself trends, or new production technologies, we find the same shift toward a much closer involvement of the consumer in production. In such a world, conventional distinctions between producer and consumer vanish.’ How will we work forty years from now?
Read Chriet Titulaer interview in the Dutch daily the NRC in 1992 ‘Chriet Titulaer: Een kantoor zonder ‘netwerk’ bestaat straks niet meer. Afwezigheid op kantoor wordt troef’.
Photo from Archief Beeld en Geluid