A look back at TechoCon 2018
The second annual conference devoted to the future of the office environment finished successfully. For a whole day TECHO’s Prague showroom was devoted to new technology and innovations in the workplace environment. This year the main theme was life and work in coworking environments, a topical theme everyone is now interested in, from small start-ups to international corporations.
5 reasons why coworking is catching on around the world
Here are the five main reasons why, along with other interesting themes, we focused on coworking at this year’s TechoCon.
- The work space of the future will be fundamentally different
- Companies, and the people in them, are changing their work habits, changing structure and the organisation of their work teams
- Office layout is changing: a couple of decades has passed since the “discovery” of open-plan offices, and we are now moving onto open-plan 2.1.
- By the end of 2018, 1.7 million people around the world will be working in 19 000 coworking centres.
- Coworking in the Czech Republic is growing: in Prague alone there are now several dozen coworking centres. They are also springing up in other towns.
Coworking in the Czech Republic
The first coworking centres in the Czech Republic started in 2009, which is somewhat later than in the rest of Europe. Over the past eight years this sector has undergone huge development in terms of the number of centres and the total area devoted to coworking.
Today in the Czech Republic we can count 61 coworking centres, and it is highly probably that by the time you read this that number will have increased. The phenomenon of cooperation and sharing space is also expanding to other towns in the Czech Republic: there is a direct correlation with qualified workforce, a student population and also a strong technological background.
After Prague, Impact Hub has recently opened a centre in Brno, the largest in Europe (3400 m2). In 2017, Node5 opened a coworking centre in Ústí nad Labem. Other large players are looking on and planning their potential expansion. The market is transforming and growing dynamically.
What you could learn and hear at the second TechoCon
The main speakers and contributors at TechoCon 2018 were architects, designers, people directly creating and using office space. We also invited specialists from fields not directly connected with the design of office space: psychologists, researchers and analysts in areas relating to human behavioural response to a given environment.
The programme for the main stage included a talk by Lubomír Šilhavý, founder of WorkLounge, and the evening lecture by Chris Cooley from the American agency Evelo, which concentrates on coworking. There was also a packed programme on the satellite stage, which was devoted to the miniworkshops of individual exhibitors.
Interest in the future of the workplace environment is growing.
This year an amazing 451 of us attended the conference. We see this number as an obligation for the future, and we have already started working on next year’s conference. Together we hope that we can take this conference another step higher.
For us as the organiser, TechoCon was a dream fulfilled. The first TechoCon last year was a leap into the unknown. We didn’t know what the result would be, but we believed that the theme was one that would generate interest. The attendance last year showed just how great the interest was amongst people in the profession.
What can you look forward to?
The conference is over for another year, but we will continue to develop the theme further. Every week we write a blog, we have a Facebook profile and, above all, every month we will organise a TechoCon Morning Meeting (TMM).
Don’t miss out on the latest news from the fast moving world of the office environment. Follow us on the internet and we hope to see you next year at the third annual TechoCon.
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