Most Faculty Decline Smaller Offices Despite Digital Shift in University Study

A comprehensive single-institution survey at a major research university in Seoul, South Korea, found that less than a third of surveyed faculty members were willing to trade smaller private offices for enhanced shared amenities and reconfigured floor plans. Published in Architectural Research, the investigation revealed that only 76 of 258 participating faculty respondents, representing 29.5 percent of the sample, accepted a hypothetical proposal bundling reduced personal office footprints with access to shared facilities such as meeting-capable pantries and improved spatial arrangements. While higher education planners frequently speculate that digital transformation diminishes the need for expansive personal offices, the empirical findings demonstrate that digital workflows do not simply dematerialise academic work, but instead reconfigure its spatial demands around persistent requirements for physical equipment, storage, and private interactions.

The study, conducted through a November 2024 survey distributed to 1,753 faculty members that yielded a 14.7 percent completion rate, sought to evaluate how professors assess their existing accommodations and under what specific conditions they might support spatial downsizing. Rather than treating workplace preferences as abstract inclinations, the research team structured their statistical inquiry around two primary empirical outcomes: satisfaction with existing private office size, recorded on a five-point ordinal scale, and binary conditional acceptance of the bundled downsizing proposal. The analytical sample was contextualised through architectural analyses of existing floor plans ranging from 19.61 to 31.30 square metres across multiple colleges, as well as an assessment of published institutional space-allocation benchmarks from universities in South Korea and abroad.

Investigating the everyday tools of academic practice, the researchers observed that modern scholarly tasks generate a substantial physical footprint despite pervasive computerisation. Desktops equipped with two or more monitors were utilised by 63.2 percent of participants, and when combined with other desktop or external-screen setups, 94.2 percent of respondents reported maintaining workstation hardware that demands considerable surface area, dedicated power connectivity, and systematic wire management. Furthermore, 56.2 percent of faculty described their daily routines as a mixture of digital and physical workflows, whereas 34.5 percent categorised their work as primarily digital. Physical storage needs averaged 3.58 on a five-point scale, demonstrating that document archives, physical books, and research artefacts continue to occupy critical spatial volume alongside multi-screen digital installations.

In-room personal interactions also proved to be deeply embedded within daily routines, directly contradicting assumptions that professional consultations have shifted entirely to online platforms or central departmental conference rooms. Nearly half of the respondents, 46.1 percent, reported using an in-office meeting table two to three times per day, while 23.3 percent utilised their table four or more times daily, and only 4.7 percent indicated having no meeting table at all. Personal hygiene amenities also featured prominently in the institutional context; 83.3 percent of participants considered an individual washbasin inside their private office to be necessary or very necessary, whereas support for a separately proposed shared oral-hygiene alternative reached an average score of only 2.32 out of five.

Statistical modeling of office-size satisfaction revealed that spatial dimensions and workstation arrangements operate jointly to shape occupant assessments. Using an extended ordinal logistic regression based on 250 complete cases, the researchers established that occupying larger rooms was strongly associated with higher satisfaction. Compared with offices measuring 20 square metres or less, the common odds ratio for reporting higher size satisfaction rose to 3.86 for rooms between 20 and 25 square metres, and reached 8.76 for spaces exceeding 25 square metres. Adequate equipment arrangement was also a critical positive determinant, exhibiting an odds ratio of 4.49. Notably, female faculty and tenure-track appointees reported higher satisfaction within the extended model, whereas the contrast between humanities, education, and law faculty and engineering disciplines was attenuated after adjusting for demographic and professional covariates.

Because a proportional-odds score test indicated that the relationship varied across rating boundaries, the authors conducted an exploratory partial proportional-odds analysis to examine threshold-specific nuances. This secondary modeling showed that having an adequate equipment arrangement was far more influential in preventing dissatisfaction than in achieving top-tier contentment. Specifically, adequate equipment arrangement was associated with odds ratios of 5.78 and 6.14 for surpassing satisfaction ratings of one or two, respectively, but yielded an odds ratio of just 0.94 for attaining the highest rating of five. Conversely, occupying an office in the largest area tier displayed its most prominent association when lifting respondents past a satisfaction score of three, recording an odds ratio of 13.49, which underlines that while layout functionality prevents severe frustration, total physical area governs superior satisfaction ratings.

In the baseline logistic regression evaluating downsizing acceptance across 250 complete cases with 73 acceptance events, acceptance was positively associated with perceived digital impact on space requirements, yielding an odds ratio of 1.77, and negatively associated with physical storage needs, with an odds ratio of 0.57. These central associations proved durable across several sensitivity analyses, including Firth’s bias-reduced estimation, three-predictor models, and respondent-adjusted specifications. However, office-size bracket, disciplinary cluster, and broad workstyle classifications exhibited no distinct adjusted associations with the decision to accept or decline the reconfiguration proposal, indicating that specific task constraints outweighed broad academic affiliations.

Perceptions of digital efficiency revealed a complex disconnect between acknowledging technological benefits and supporting personal space reductions. Among faculty who agreed that digital tools had enhanced spatial efficiency within their offices, 38.7 percent accepted the downsizing proposal, compared to 20.9 percent among those reporting no efficiency improvements. Despite this 17.8 percentage-point increase in acceptance, 61.3 percent of the efficiency-improved cohort still rejected the proposal. Moreover, when both perceived digital impact and the binary spatial-efficiency item were incorporated simultaneously into the regression model, general digital impact maintained a significant association with acceptance, whereas the adjusted coefficient for spatial efficiency improvement remained statistically uncertain, demonstrating that perceived spatial efficiency does not automatically translate into willingness to forfeit private floor area.

The study also challenged the intuitive assumption that dissatisfaction with current accommodation drives support for change. In an exploratory cross-tabulation, acceptance was documented among 36.4 percent of respondents who rated their current office size favourably with scores of four or five, representing 32 of the 88 satisfied individuals and accounting for 42.1 percent of all 76 accepting participants. Linear inclusion of satisfaction scores within the acceptance model yielded an imprecise odds ratio of 1.24, showing that high satisfaction with existing allocations and receptiveness to alternative workplace designs frequently coexist. Additionally, while longer institutional tenure was positively associated with acceptance in ordered category models, categorical likelihood-ratio checks remained inconclusive, leaving subgroup differences across career stages open to further empirical verification.

To contextualise these behavioural patterns spatially, the authors detailed a scaled architectural drawing of a furnished 25.69-square-metre faculty office containing an L-shaped desk, a six-seat meeting table, a personal washbasin, and perimeter seating. Tracing the footprint envelopes showed that physical furniture and fixtures occupied 6.33 square metres, representing 24.6 percent of the total room boundary. The L-shaped desk accounted for 1.78 square metres, the meeting table 2.48 square metres, the washbasin 0.36 square metres, and seven chairs 1.71 square metres. Because these static footprint calculations strictly omit the dynamic clearances necessary for chair movement, access pathways, and human circulation, the authors emphasized that condensing private rooms while maintaining internal meeting and workstation functions requires explicit spatial planning rather than simplistic footprint arithmetic.

The researchers situated their case against published space-management frameworks, observing that institutional guidelines often combine reduced private rooms with structured shared alternatives. South Korean university benchmarks typically designate individual faculty allocations around 20 to 25 square metres, distinct from national university-wide decrees that mandate 12 to 14 square metres of total gross facility space per student. By comparison, international precedents such as the University of Warwick’s guidelines allocate up to 12 square metres for individual academic offices, but obligate institutions to provide a shared seminar or meeting space for every eight rooms measuring 10 square metres or less. The authors stressed that successful institutional space reassessments cannot treat downsizing in isolation, but must holistically coordinate private desk depth, monitor mounting, confidential meeting access, acoustic isolation, and dedicated storage solutions before implementing estate-wide reallocations.

Subject of Research: Academic workplace evaluation and conditional faculty office downsizing acceptance

Article Title: Digital Transformation, Office Adequacy, and the Conditions for Faculty Office Downsizing

Article References: Koh, K., Won, C., Kim, Y., & Kim, S.-A. (2026). Digital Transformation, Office Adequacy, and the Conditions for Faculty Office Downsizing. Architectural Research, 28(1), Article 35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44515-026-00040-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44515-026-00040-y

Keywords: academic workplace, faculty offices, office downsizing, digital transformation, workplace evaluation, spatial efficiency, post-occupancy evaluation, campus planning, higher education facilities, equipment arrangement, physical storage, activity-based working, office allocation, indoor built environment, socio-materiality, spatial configuration