Issue 2 was about systems—how commercial buildings have to behave reliably under pressure. The office is perhaps the most visible of those systems because it sits inside a cultural argument: why come in at all? This note isn’t a list of décor ideas. It’s an attempt to name the deeper shifts shaping workplace design globally, and how those shifts are arriving in India.

The search terms are revealing: “office interior design,” “corporate office interior design,” “interior designer near me.” People aren’t searching for beauty. They’re searching for justification.

For decades the office was a default container: desks, meeting rooms, a reception that looked important. Now the office must earn its right to exist. Home can be comfortable. Remote can be efficient. So the office has to offer something neither can consistently provide: alignment without friction, culture without performance, collaboration without exhaustion.

What is the most important trend—and why isn’t it aesthetic?

The most important shift is not a material. It is choice.

Offices are moving away from one universal plan and toward a “menu” of settings: focus zones, collaboration points, enclosed rooms for calls, project rooms, learning spaces, social hubs that are meant to be used—not merely photographed.

The modern office behaves less like a floor plate and more like a small city: streets, squares, and refuges.

In India, this matters in a particular way. Long commutes and hybrid attendance make one-size offices feel irrational. People don’t come in to sit where they could have sat at home. They come in for mentorship, fast alignment, and the kind of collaboration that is hard to do well on a call.

Why are phone booths and micro-rooms returning?

Because openness had a cost.

The last decade told us open plans create creativity. Then everyone started taking calls in staircases. Privacy didn’t disappear; it just became informal—and therefore undignified.

Micro-rooms—phone booths, one- and two-person rooms, small project rooms—are not nostalgia. They are an admission that focus is environmental.

What does “hospitality” mean when it isn’t a buzzword?

It means the office is being designed as a place people can arrive into, not merely report to.

Welcome zones feel warmer. Pantries become genuine social spaces. Touchdown areas allow brief work without the theatre of “taking your seat.” But hospitality fails when it becomes noise.

A good office pairs the lounge with the library. Social energy needs a quiet counterpart.

What does wellness look like when it becomes real?

The first wave of wellness was symbolic: plants, posters, a promise.

The mature version is infrastructural: air quality, glare control, daylight logic, thermal comfort, ergonomic range, and movement designed into circulation. In Indian conditions, heat and dust are not footnotes; they are constraints that shape materials and systems.

Wellness is usually won in the boring systems—the ones you only notice when they fail.

Why is neuro-inclusion entering workplace thinking?

Because there is no single “normal” user.

Neuro-inclusive design, at its best, is simply humane choice: quieter rooms for sensory relief, predictable wayfinding, adjustable lighting in certain zones, restorative spaces that aren’t treated as exceptions.

The goal isn’t labelling. The goal is legitimacy of different needs.

What is changing in sustainability?

The serious shift is from “new green materials” to reuse and adaptability.

If a fit-out will change again in three years, designing it as if it is permanent is wasteful. Circular thinking—retain what works, refurbish what can be saved, design what must change so it can change again—is becoming both an ESG idea and a cost idea.

A useful question is blunt: What are we keeping—and what are we throwing away because it’s easier?

Where do data and AI actually help?

Data can correct assumptions: which spaces are used, which are avoided, where bottlenecks occur. Used well, it refines planning.

But the office is not only a utilisation diagram. It is culture made spatial. Culture cannot be automated into existence.

Issue 4 brings the series back to place—Ahmedabad—and outlines what I believe matters when choosing an architecture firm here, beyond reputation and lists.

— Brijesh Patel

Founder & Principal Architect, Vastu Nirman Architects (VNA)