Stepping into cooperative buildings

If we are stepping out of windows (of the GUI kind), what are we stepping into? We suggest it is into cooperative buildings. For the foreseeable future, at least, we can identify two major characteristics of the cooperative building. The spaces of the building will be augmented in various ways, providing an ambient environment that bridges spatial discontinuities in workgroups and provides a continuous window into the state of the virtual world. Secondly, the ways in which the spaces themselves are used will evolve to be more congruent with the fluid, dynamic and distributed nature of the work taking place in the building. These two characteristics are deeply interconnected. This evolution need not happen entirely in the physical world; the essence of a cooperative building will become the way in which it mixes both physical and virtual affordances to support the workaday activities of its inhabitants.