BREAKOUT!
BREAKOUT! is a two-week festival that returns creative work back to the streets of New York. 

Using co-working as a model, and injecting lightweight versions of essential  infrastructure into urban public spaces, BREAKOUT! seeks to liberate creative workers from the confines of traditional office buildings.
What is BREAKOUT?
Why BREAKOUT?
Once upon a time, office buildings made sense. Around the turn of the 20th century, as corporations grew in size, office buildings were the best architectural solution to bringing lots of clerical workers into proximity with the piles of paper they needed for their work.
That doesn't make sense anymore.

Paper is still a part of our work, but the growing majority of our documents are digital. Telecommunications and other once-fixed business tools are now portable and distributed.
 
So why are we still working in offices?
A festival of mobile co-working
New York City
September 12-20, 2009

www.breakoutfestival.org
Put simply, we still need each other.

While telecommunications tools provide to collaborate at a distance, the most valuable work in today's urban economies - creative knowledge work - benefits from close physical proximity. Brainstorming, sharing of abstract ideas, rapid problem-solving and prototyping, and building trust are all things that work best face-to-face.
And while workspace designers have stretched the useful life of the office building far beyond what we ever though possible, a new vision of the creative city is emerging. In this vision work can move out of the office, back onto the streets and into cafes and public spaces.
Over the last few years, as the growth of the distributed freelance economy collided with a tight commercial real estate market, the co-working movement was born.

Co-workers gather together to create spaces for individual and collaborative work, informally structured around cafes, rented offices, and regular meetups and "un-conferences".

Co-working is a response to the need to provide face-to-face touch points for a community of people who do much of their work in distributed online collaborations.

But co-working just isn't scaling fast enough - in many cities, the realities of the commercial real estate market make it hard to obtain traditional office space for co-workers.
But public space is free.

And in recent years, we've seen public spaces like Bryant Park in New York City start providing the kinds of infrastructure that knowledge workers need - like wireless Internet, flexible furniture. And since these are some of the most stimulating and pleasant places in our cities, they provide an alternative future for locating work in the creative city.
Or maybe its not such a new vision after all. If we look back at the city before the office building, the streets were the site of every kind of economic activity. In the New York of 1900, almost every kind of activity possible took place in the streets.
To explore these possiblities, BREAKOUT! is taking work out of buildings and bringing it back to the streets.

To do this, BREAKOUT! will prototype future patterns of mobile, creative work in the public spaces of New York City. Our goal is not to develop sustainable models, but to provoke discussion about how urban designers, architects, freelancers and businesspeople can create public spaces that re-integrate the commercial life of knowledge-based cities into public spaces.
First, how can we escape the daily grind by pulling meetings out of dull corporate conference rooms and injecting them into dynamic, stimulating public spaces, and third spaces.
We'll create these experiences through a combination of three elements:

An online social network for linking up and sharing interests and projects
A set of processes and skills for facilitating collaboration
Temporary and mobile infrastructure to bridge the migration from office to public spaces.

Our goal is to document and license these toolkits under a Creative Commons license that allows groups around the world to hold their own BREAKOUT! festivals anytime, anywhere.
Learning From Co-Working
BarCamp at La Cantine (Paris, France)
Google, Workplace design by DEGW
Mobile work at Bryant Park's wireless hotspot in midtown Manhattan
AIA New York Chapter Technology Committee meets in Bryant Park.
July 9, 2002.
Third, how can we create refuges from the world of distant connectivity yet amplify local connectivity for intense collaboration? 

How can we get away from the Internet and focus on the discussions at hand, yet still take advantage of the networked communications within small co-present groups?
Second, how can we replicate the ad hoc collaboration that occurs at the best co-working sessions but avoid the laptop-ification of many shared spaces?

How can we choreograph co-working without creating too much structure that constrains creativity?
We'll explore several scenarios of mobile co-working over the two weeks of BREAKOUT!
to this...
from this...
This...
...not this.
Block outside
wireless signals..
..to collaborate
locally instead.
Finally, how mobile can work get?

Beyond just springing our corporate brethren from the shackles of their cubicles, can we take work on the move? Can we turn digital nomads loose to roam the city and metropolitan area, seeking stimulative and creative niche spaces wherever they may be?
From fixed...
...to mobile
USE THE ICONS AT RIGHT TO MOVE THROUGH THE PREZI