Industry Leaders EP21 with Ceilidh Higgins

Ceilidh Higgins spent about twenty years as an architect and interior designer before moving into workplace strategy with CBRE‘s Pacific Workplace Consulting team. That double vantage point — designing offices, then sitting inside a global property business measuring how they actually get used — runs through the whole conversation. She starts with a warning that designers rarely hear: architects’ own studios are nothing like the workplaces they design for lawyers, HR teams and IT departments, and that mismatch quietly shapes what gets built.

From there the episode traces how the office got here and why it seems stuck. Ceilidh’s argument to host Seton Walsh-Rose is that workplace design evolved tightly with technology — straight desks for typewriters, L-shaped desks for CRT monitors, then the linear bench — and then simply stopped around 2010, even as the way we work kept moving. Meetings multiplied while physically emptying out. Desk sharing became near-universal. And the one thing still tying anyone to a fixed desk, she argues, is the monitor. If voice and AI take the keyboard away, open plan and the desk itself are both back on the drawing board.

Episode Chapters

• 00:11 Episode introduction
• 00:45 Meet Ceilidh Higgins
• 01:30 Why designers’ own offices mislead them
• 02:09 Starting out at GHD
• 03:15 The gap in understanding
• 04:50 The most underutilised spaces in corporate offices
• 05:18 Placement, not concept
• 06:00 Noise, neurodiversity and preference
• 07:47 The office is a twentieth-century invention
• 08:43 Desk evolution — and where it stopped
• 10:55 Workflows that never caught up
• 11:17 When going to meetings becomes the job
• 12:24 The jump room and the three-person meeting
• 13:52 Workplaces change slower than AI
• 16:58 Dispersed teams
• 18:50 “Why come to the office to sit on Teams calls?”
• 19:06 CBRE’s approach
• 20:36 Frontline versus corporate
• 21:15 Autonomy, certainty and the brain
• 24:14 AI’s unproven productivity
• 25:21 Where AI actually landed
• 26:43 Small business is outpacing enterprise
• 27:25 The team level is the unlock
• 28:45 The one-person business
• 31:55 Headcount forecasting has broken
• 33:23 Absorbing growth instead of downsizing
• 34:18 Space per head
• 35:27 One desk per ten square metres
• 36:48 Activity-based working versus hot desking
• 38:04 Desk sharing ratios
• 39:31 Working alone together
• 40:54 The monitor problem
• 41:46 CBRE Sydney
• 43:24 Post-occupancy results
• 44:11 A connection strategy
• 45:03 The Midnight Lunch
• 45:52 What if we stop typing?
• 46:31 The last hardware tether
• 48:42 Technology cycles versus leases
• 50:24 Running a $60m refurb from an iPad
• 50:59 Humans are the slowest to change
• 53:48 What doesn’t change
• 54:17 An AI-enabled team space
• 55:41 Isolation, equity and life stage
• 57:19 What the built environment still needs
• 58:27 Culture is deliberate, or it happens
• 59:05 Intentionality over osmosis
• 1:01:31 Editing AI until it finds your voice
• 1:01:42 When the job becomes QA
• 1:02:38 Who Ceilidh reads
• 1:03:18 CoreNet Australia
• 1:04:04 Closing thoughts

Key Takeaways

• Office design stalled around 2010.
• Collaboration space usually fails on placement.
• Meetings got bigger and emptier at the same time.
• Activity-based working is not hot desking.
• Density backfires.
• The missing space is the team space.
• Post-occupancy study is where the learning is.
• AI’s productivity case is still unproven.
• Small businesses are outpacing enterprises on AI.
• The monitor is the last thing tying us to a desk.
• Humans change slower than technology or leases.
• Culture happens whether you build it or not.

Sound Bites / Quotes:
“Not in the workplaces, but in the world of AI. Workplaces are much slower to change.”
— Ceilidh Higgins, ~13:52

References & Resources

• The Midnight Lunch — Ceilidh’s blog since 2013, on work, technology and design: https://themidnightlunch.com/
• CoreNet Global Australia — Ceilidh chairs the CoreNet conference: https://www.corenetaustralia.org/
• XY Sense — workplace occupancy sensors and analytics, cited on meeting-room data: https://xysense.com/
• Revizto — https://revizto.com/
• Autodesk Construction Cloud — https://construction.autodesk.com/
• Wispr Flow — https://wisprflow.ai/
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Administration Building and its Great Workroom: https://www.scjohnson.com/en/news-stories/blog/administration-building
• Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation: https://franklloydwright.org/
• Net Promoter Score — https://www.netpromoter.com/know/
• Phil Kirschner — The Workline: https://walktheworkline.com/
• Brian Elliott — co-founder of Future Forum, Work Forward: https://theworkforward.substack.com/
• Nick Bloom — https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/
• WFH Research — https://wfhresearch.com/
• Bruce Daisley — author and host of Eat Sleep Work Repeat: https://eatsleepworkrepeat.com/
• Make Work Better — Bruce Daisley’s newsletter: https://makeworkbetter.substack.com/