Rewilding the office: from factory floor to forest floor

Lianie Minny, Sales & Solutions Manager for Workplace Solutions at Profica, takes us through a vision of the future office and how workplaces are evolving with AI as a ‘copilot.’

Imagine if your office could breathe. Not just circulate filtered air, but truly breathe like a forest – alive, responsive, and interconnected. For too long, we’ve designed with our inherited industrial-era mindset, creating workplaces that are static, pre-programmed, and fixed. But the world isn’t static, people aren’t static, and the nature of work is constantly evolving. It’s time to stop pretending buildings are just physical assets and recognise them for what they are: living systems. 

Like any ecosystem, they affect, and are affected by, every living being inside them. Nature  thrives on balance, diversity, and interdependence. In workplace design, we must move away from the rigid and extractive factory floor,  and embrace the forest floor – dynamic, diverse and alive.

Our traditional approach to office design often treats the building as a container for work, a space built for control and compliance. Hospitals make us feel like patients, schools make us sit still, and offices? Often, they just make us type. We’re handed a brief and asked to execute, not to imagine. But buildings are powerful tools that shape our behaviour. If we don’t understand the purpose they are meant to serve, how can we design them well? 

Right now, companies are struggling to bring people back to the office. But maybe the office itself isn’t the problem. Maybe it’s that people don’t feel purposeful when they’re there. The real challenge and opportunity lies in designing spaces that activate purpose, bring company culture to life, and honour both human diversity and natural rhythms.

Some might argue that the focus should be on remote work, making the physical office obsolete. Others may point to tight budgets and risk-averse leadership as insurmountable barriers to radical change. While remote work has its place, innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. It emerges from the messy, spontaneous collisions of minds that occur in shared spaces. As for budgets, rewilding isn’t about massive capital expenditure. It’s a performance strategy. It begins not with a complete redesign, but with a change in mindset.

The journey starts with moving beyond simple biophilic design, which brought nature into our spaces. We must now progress to biomimicry and, ultimately, biointegration. This means designing spaces that not only look like nature but behave like it. An office in Cape Town should mirror the rhythm of its unique landscape, while a studio in Limpopo should draw from the spirit of its soil—not for branding, but because it is alive to its environment. We need to create not just green buildings, but living ones.

In this transformation, we have a powerful new partner: Artificial Intelligence. Rejecting AI now would be like rejecting the internet in the 90s. We have moved from the Information Age into the Imagination Age, and AI is no longer just a tool; it’s our co-pilot. AI can help us track the real-time use, movement, and even mood within a space. It can simulate team dynamics and predict stress zones. By co-creating with this live, responsive data, we are not replacing human creativity; we are liberating it from the constraints of guesswork.

So, where do we begin?  First, rewild your thinking. Invite nature in — not just as decoration, but as a partner. Second, reimagine your role. Designers, leaders, and employees — we’re all creators of our environment. And next, reconnect. With each other. With purpose. With the planet.

A practical start is to introduce what I call ‘micro-moments of aliveness’. These are small, intentional changes: introducing natural textures and scents, allowing for more movement by breaking up static layouts, and giving people genuine choice over where and how they work. For a risk-averse leadership team, we don’t sell a design trend; we present a performance strategy. We align these nature-based designs with tangible business outcomes like improved focus, higher energy levels, and fewer sick days. The return on investment becomes clear when nature is a partner in performance.

The future office is more than a container for work; it is a catalyst for purpose. It’s a responsive environment — one that learns how we move, feel, collaborate, and even rest. A space that combines AI and nature, ergonomics and ecology. 

We’re moving into a future that’s not just sustainable, but regenerative. It’s an environment where connection is inevitable, not accidental. By rewilding our thinking, reimagining our roles, and reconnecting with each other and our planet, we can build a place to belong—a workplace that truly nourishes the environment, and the human spirit.