London startup pops up rentable offices

The Future. Entrepreneur and designer Walter Craven has created a work booth that can be dropped onto city blocks, into train stations, or inside hotel lobbies to act as rentable remote-working spaces. Craven wants to make these pods more than a quick work-from-anywhere invention — he wants to have them be an “integrated” part of any city — even acting as e-transport charging stations or venues to host public art.

E-office
If there are no seats at the coffee shop, you may be able to give work pods a try.

• Walter Craven, the founder of Make.Work.Space, designed a small pod that can be rented by the hour via a reservation app — like an e-scooter.
• They’re designed to be placed all around cities, so that remote workers can pop in to send emails, record a podcast, or take a meeting on the go.
• The wood-and-steel pods will come with WiFi, lighting and temperature control, a desk, chairs, an LED screen, a camera and mic setup, and speakers.

And because COVID is still on everyone’s mind, a UV light and air-filtration system will clean the pods after each use.

Work booths
The pods would be tentatively available for $9-16 per hour… so a little more expensive than just buying a coffee and staking a claim at a booth, but also way more amenities.

Each pod (of which only two are built so far) will reportedly cost $26,000, which means companies — as opposed to municipal governments — may be the first to purchase them for their campuses.

Craven believes that the pods could act as an “in-between” for workers commuting back and forth between home and the office. And with 16% of companies around the world going fully remote, coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and expensive WeWorks may not be able to handle all the demand for good on-the-go workspaces.