Holographic user interfaces, 128-bit-encrypted passwords which can be hacked in 30 seconds, "mission control"-style workspaces, and death-dealing robots with excellent coding skills. Based on popular media portrayals of the future - in films such as Minority Report and Swordfish and television shows like 24 and Battlestar Galactica - how many of us could really expect to last a day in the office of tomorrow?

Maybe more than you'd think. Dystopia may be fun to watch, but few of us will ever experience such workplaces. "I think most of the representations of the workplace in the media are funny, because none of them represents what most people deal with," opines one advanced technology researcher in a Fortune 100 company, speaking on condition of anonymity. She cites the cubicle-filled office of the FBI drama Numb3rs as an exercise in dramatic license: Workers always look busy. No one ever stops to chat. Also stretching believability: CTU headquarters on 24, where government agents freely discuss classified information in an open-plan office.

On screen, saving the world requires ample back-and-forth. Today's office environments, however, too often squash easy communication. Part of the blame rests with poor design decisions. For example, the technology researcher says, until a few months ago her workgroup occupied extra space in an acquired company's building. Offices with doors abounded, as did high-quality coffee and soda. Then corporate headquarters decided to cut costs and relocated all employees in the state to a different complex - filled mostly with cubicles. Of her workgroup, she says, "I'm the luckiest one, because I have a corner cube with a window, whereas my boss's office looks like the gorilla exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, all dark inside with just a little window looking in from the hall."

If this is the workplace of the future, people want out. Indeed, many employees are turning to telecommuting, in large part to escape their noisy work environments. In essence, "people have started reacting to this workplace of tomorrow by turning to the workplace of 200 years ago - the home," the analyst observes.

The Workplace Design Paradox

What accounts for the sad state of today's workspace design? Corporate planners may simply be over-planning. For example, Stuart Scott, chief executive of consulting firm Guinnen MacRath, recently visited a financial services firm which uses cubicles surrounded by an enforced "hush zone" for solo work and "huddle rooms" for conversations, meetings, and conference calls. However, consultants - who had nowhere else to sit - typically colonized the huddle rooms. The result was an environment in which employees didn't interact much.

Cubicles, notes Scott, can function as places of productivity and interaction, provided employees trust each other. Why? Because by their nature cubicles magnify voices. Everyone can hear everything their cube-mates say to each other or on the phone. So, employees have to trust each other to keep private information private. Unfortunately, trust is in short supply these days. "This is a result of continuous downsizing, and the sense that we're all dispensable," says Scott, an expert in workplace psychology. When people don't trust each other, cubicles simply discourage interaction and heighten employees' disconnection and discontentment.

Unsurprisingly, for cubicle-based employees who aren't tied to support jobs or a laboratory, "anywhere but the office" is often the place of maximum productivity, be it at home, Starbucks, on a hotel room bed or in an airport lounge, simply because such places are "so much friendlier," Scott says.

The Anti-Cubicle Manifesto

How can companies help engineer a workplace that actually, well, works? First, they should discard the prevailing notion of office as human container, with its "sterile, hotel-like environments," Scott suggests. "The cube farm - the whole floor of cubes - is always going to be the default ... for companies that just aren't thinking about how to get productivity out of people."

Next, "destroy the conference rooms - at least the little ones designed for five or six people," he says. Instead, provide large, well-lit rooms with multiple spatial options. "I love it when people have little rectangular tables that we can pod in different ways."

Interestingly, while many physical office spaces challenge productivity, newer disruptive technologies - Skype, corporate Facebooks, blogs, collaborative software, instant messaging and the like - are helping employees sidestep their offices and boost productivity. The technologist notes that aside from a few people, everyone she works with is elsewhere - in India, France, Pennsylvania, or Dallas. Accordingly, she's frequently on "NetMeeting, e-mail, or the phone." For her, work isn't about face-to-face interactions, but about how to foster collaboration and teamwork via virtual modes of communication.

Professional Networks Work

Given the increasing dearth of face-to-face interactions, then, what are the implications for physical office space? "Maybe the workplace of the future doesn't matter at all," notes Scott. "Maybe the practices for how we connect with each other matter instead."

Indeed, the future of work will require companies to better support distributed teamwork and communication, both culturally and technologically, says Vanessa DiMauro, a principal at Leader Networks, a Winthrop, Mass., firm that advises companies on community-building. Beyond helping employees become more productive, such investments will also benefit the bottom line, since these technologies help overcome "time and geography" restrictions on collaboration, in effect giving businesses "increased access to staff skills and resources."

Increasingly, essential collaboration will also occur across company lines. For example, take INMobile.org, an online community for global mobile and wireless executives, which DiMauro advised. Through the private, online community and related conference calls, executives "increase their access to other leaders like themselves, have opportunities for ad hoc discussions about major industry events within seconds of them happening, and are able to engage in thoughtful discussions about predictive topics in a private and safe environment," DiMauro says.

DiMauro believes this is a preview for where collaborative technologies may take us: toward private, protected, and virtual workplaces through which peers connect to help better accomplish their jobs, often outside the corporate aegis. "This is the stuff the future workplace is made of," she believes.