Page 77 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Moving between places
determine the use of the place for any given time, who was in the place and thereby also define the boundaries of the workplace. In contrast, the existing norms in cafés are likely to conflict with the workers’ intention, as we described earlier in the example of being interrupted to order food. In some extreme instances, this clash with became so pronounced that the café owners banned working from the locations. Also, for workers, the noises and general volume of chatter can be distracting.
In co-working spaces, workers could choose from different areas, such as focus and collaborative areas. However, we noticed during our field observations that even the collaborative areas were used for focused work, and our informants tended to name ‘other people asking questions’ as a distraction. Headphones were often worn in both areas for the purpose of signaling one’s focused workplace and the wish not to be disturbed to others as well as for listening to music, which drowned out any noises from the outside. Overall, the worker’s ability to control incoming distractions in co-working spaces is most enabled in the dedicated focus areas.
Lastly, instant sociality was often described in co-working spaces, sometimes in cafés, and never in housing. In co-working spaces, people’s proximity to each other, as well as the people’s similar motivations of coming to these paces, enabled workers to easily embed themselves socially, both on a personal and a professional level. For example, so-called ‘community boards’ – a physical board where people could put up notes (Figure 2.8) – afforded to connect with others based on sharing the same interests. While there are also people in cafés present, the motivations of coming to a café vary more widely across the guests, and they are as less likely to align with the nomadic worker’s intentions as they are to conflict with them. Furthermore, housing lacks opportunities to interact with others.
2.5 Discussion
We began our study by pointing out that we know little about how digital nomads organize for work (with the exception of Jarrahi et al., 2019),
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