Fifty years ago America was in the throes of its transportation revolution. The national highway system had just been completed, and faster jet planes made continental air travel viable. It was perhaps inevitable that personal jet-propulsion packs and Jetsons-like flying cars figured prominently in depictions of what life might be like in, oh, the year 2000. Of course, most of those prophecies have proved wildly inaccurate.

In the year 2000 we're in the middle of an information revolution. So when FORTUNE asked four of America's largest office-design companies (Knoll, Herman Miller, Haworth, and Hon Industries) to predict what our workplaces might look like 50 years from now, we weren't surprised that matters of communication figured prominently in all the designs. The promise behind the visions is appealing: Unlike today's cell phones, pagers, faxes, and e-mail, which interfere with our personal interactions even as they enable them, the technology of 2050 will encourage face-to-face communication, or at the very least an excellent holographic facsimile. So say the designers. The visions on these pages may reveal the future of the workplace. They may also be the discarded flying cars and jetpacks of the future.

Next Section: Knoll: Virtual Seance in the Conference Room

Vol. 141, No. 5
March 6, 2000