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Designing borders to enable effective work at home and enhance the quality of domestic life
Given the very dynamic and competitive relationship between work and home, people working at home set up 'borders' to protect and enable work within the home.
The borders delineate the time and place of work, but also set out the rules of behaviour and expectations that differentiate the worker from their other home roles and activities as partner, parent, homemaker, host, or just relaxing at home. The borders are therefore spatial, temporal, social, role and psychological.
How can design help to reinforce these all-important borders so that work doesn't entirely dominate the home, or conversely, home life doesn't squeeze out the ability to work?
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 physical and spatial borders - if a separate office or room isn't possible, screens, plants and enclosures, different lighting and furniture, or different colours can be used to create physical and atmospheric boundaries
- temporal borders - timed appliances, like lights and music that turn on and off at specific times, can help reinforce temporal borders
- social borders - design can help support key social messages like 'I'm busy' (perhaps signs on a door or low lighting) or 'this is family time' (separate phone lines and answering machines for work)
- role borders - creating separate identities for work and other roles can help establish clear boundaries. This may involve creating a distinct image for the work space itself or creating distinct role identities through clothing and accessories. Putting on work clothes at the beginning of the day and changing at the end of the day is a clear signal that the transition between work and domestic life is being made
- psychological borders - most of the above develop psychological borders - the need to create distinct borders in your own mind
Supporting the nomadic worker
To support the nomadic worker, design can make a significant contribution:
- developing work equipment that is miniaturised,
 portable and useable
- developing and placing internet and information kiosks in public places
- addressing the car interior and onboard information systems to support people working from the road
- rethinking transport nodes, such as airports, train stations, motorway service stations to allow nomadic workers to log on and carry out work
- redesigning high street, roadside and transport terminal leisure facilities to create opportunities for work
- developing software and communication systems to support virtual teams
The dynamic workplace
In the flexible workplace context, design can respond by
- rethinking office layout to provide a greater range of shared and drop-in facilities, while reducing the overall volume of space required
- incorporating new ideas and metaphors into office interiors - like the piazza or street - to create a greater sense of community and knowledge exchange, such as lack of privacy or lack of interpersonal communication
- developing new products and services which support the
corridor cruiser - the mobile worker who roams the office campus
- creating induction packs which simply and quickly educate temporary employees to company culture and key methods of work
- create town squares and hot spots which foster spontaneous interactions between different disciplines
- support teams in spaces and with facilities which allow creative interchange to develop
  
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