Co-Working Spaces are the Future of Work but that Could be a Good Thing

he growing phenomenon of co-working spaces - places where individuals can rent a desk of their own while sharing a range of other facilities with their co-tenants - is as indicative of the changing nature of work as almost any metric you care to name, writes the Guardian.

Although many see the casualisation of the workforce that this growth represents as an inherently bad thing - rightly focusing on the way in which technology is tending to convert full-time work into part-time "gigs" - there may well be a big upside. Co-working is a model that gives workers themselves, the digital nomads of gig economy, more control over their working lives.

How big is the sector? Small Business Labs, an organisation that monitors it around the world, suggests that the number of people renting such spaceswill grow globally from just under 1m in 2016 to nearly 4m in 2020.

According to research by user experience researchers Melissa Gregg and Thomas Lodato, co-working can be a positive choice for many freelancers . They argue that, in part, such workers are seeking "relief from the emotional demands of the corporate office".

Co-working spaces, they write, "expanded significantly in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008/9", adding this "style of work emerged in response to the slow plod of austerity, hollowed-out corporations, underemployment and career insecurity". They argue that "co-working spaces met a growing demand for care and fulfilment as much as employment".

So is co-working a good thing in itself or simply a rational response to negative changes in traditional workplaces?

Gregg, who is principal engineer in the Business Client Research and Strategy Client Computing Group at Intel Corporation, says with all the variations of...