Traditionally, most academic office spaces were designed to provide individual members of staff with their ‘own’ desks in fixed locations, often in the form of one or two person offices (see also the "Owned vs Shared" section). However, as in other sectors, higher education institutions have placed an increasing emphasis on developing flexible office environments for their academics and researchers. The desire for greater flexibility can be attributed to a number of factors, including:

• The cost of providing dedicated desk for every member of staff, which can typically be upwards of £5000 per year, coupled with the poor levels of desk utilisation in many academic workspaces - on average, desks are only occupied for around 40 percent of the working day.
   
• The varied nature of academic work and research, which involve a range of activities that lend themselves to different types of workspace, together with the availability of new information and communication technologies that enable people to work from different locations.

Most, if not all, of the academic workspace projects that we have looked at during our study included ‘flexibility’ as a design aim, either implicitly or explicitly. This manifested itself in a number of ways, including the provision of:

• More easily reconfigurable workspaces, though use of demountable partitions or open-plan layouts
   
• Non-territorial environments, in which occupants do not have a fixed location but use desks and workspaces as they need them
   
• ‘Generic’ workspaces, which are not designed around the needs of any one particular group of academics or researcher

Examples of easily reconfigurable workspaces can be found at the Jennie Lee Building at the Open University and the Chaucer Building at Nottingham Trent University. The former has an open-plan office layout, which can be reconfigured differently depending on the requirements of a particular workgroup. The latter has a cellular layout, but with demountable partitions to reduce reconfiguration costs. 

As with any design strategy, there is a risk that flexibility is used for the wrong reasons.  For example, "we want flexibility" can often mean "we don't yet know what we want", "we'd like to keep all our options open" or "we're afraid to make a decision".  Ensuring that the need for flexibility is clearly articulated at the briefing stage is therefore critical.