Redefining the place of work: Telecommuting and the home

Abstract

With automation, every aspect of office work becomes streamlined, on-line, and universally accessible. This eliminates the need for a hierarchical work structure, and for spatially and temporally bounded offices. When traditional cultural constructs are abandoned through telecommunication and electronic technologies, both home and work need to be redefined. Because the workplace is being transplanted into the home, workers must establish boundaries between these two worlds to substitute for the loss of office social interaction and to balance professional and personal life. Social and architectural theories, statistics and case studies, have alternately made both dire and optimistic predictions about the repercussions of telecommuting. This thesis tests these predictions through case studies which examine how actual people are coping with this new way of working and living. It uses the resulting information to focus on the ways that home design is affected by these phenomena.