Location Multiplicity: Lost Space in the Hybrid Office

Navigating the complexities of shared hybrid workspaces presents significant challenges, with a risk of producing problematic spatial dynamics. Drawing on an ethnographic study, we scrutinize how office workers produce and negotiate hybrid spatial arrangements and identify location multiplicity as a core challenge for reintroducing physical elements into hybrid office workspaces after the COVID-19 pandemic. From a temporal perspective, hybrid work represents multiple locations, separated across several ‘homes’ and office spaces. Location multiplicity emphasizes the mobility of individuals, introducing instability and unpredictability into cooperative work. To navigate the temporal nature of constellation change, our findings reveal workers rely on the stability of the digital space, while consequently disconnecting from the malleable physical space. Thus, the physical space risks becoming a lost opportunity for the collocated subgroup - a ‘lost space’ in hybrid work. We suggest that a CSCW design challenge for hybrid work is designing hybrid infrastructures that facilitate an experience of stability and predictability across temporal and spatial dimensions, with embedded affordances for integrating both physical and digital elements across multiple locations.