Russ Burtner has five e-mail addresses and two instant-messaging accounts. He has a home phone, a cell phone, and two work phones. He has a Facebook page, a MySpace page, two accounts on LinkedIn, and a Classmates.com account. All told, that's 16 different ways for people to get hold of him. And, Burtner said, "This doesn't count just walking down the hall and having an ad-hoc, in-person conversation."

Granted, Burtner is a user engineer for the Microsoft Center for Information Work (CIW), in Redmond, Wash., so you'd expect him to be especially wired. But if you think about your own e-mail addresses, your own phone and fax numbers, your own BlackBerry - you realize that a dozen-plus avenues of communication is close to the norm. You also realize that most of those avenues direct people to your professional sphere - to your place of work.

Which is part of the problem with today's office technology. It's given us so many ways to share information with each other but not so many ways to prioritize, filter, and synch all that information. It's drinking from a fire hose when all you really need is a single, judicious sip.

No surprise, then, that a big priority for Burtner and his colleagues at the CIW is to streamline workplace technologies, systems, and processes. Their official job, according to Burtner, is "to articulate Microsoft's vision of what information work and knowledge work could look like five to 10 years out." What that really means is they're busy designing the office of the future.

In last month's issue, we considered the office of the future from on high, examining the general trends in design and usage - including flexibility, sustainability, telework, and customization - that will shape how, where, and even when we work in the coming decades. In this issue, we zoom in on the specific applications, services, and gadgets those trends are engendering, and will continue to engender, in increasingly labor-saving, attention-focusing, information-prioritizing permutations.

The end game of these office devices of tomorrow, according to Burtner and other experts working in this area: a more stylized, harmonious work environment. One that tightens the tap on the information spraying us from every angle. That minimizes our environmental footprint. And that leaves us healthier - physically and mentally. "We're going to go from someone having to come to work, enter an eight-by-eight cubicle, and have to sit there for most of the time," said Bud Klipa, president of Details, a subsidiary of Steelcase, "to far more flexibility with regard to choosing where you can work to get your work done in the best way."

Very Personal Computing
In some ways, the Information Age has been too successful. It's delivered so much information, so quickly, from so many vantage points, that people feel like they're drowning in raw data. Thus, job No. 1 of many of the systems and products in development at the Microsoft CIW and other forward-looking projects is stemming, sifting through, and redirecting the flow.

Touch technology. Think of the touch-sensitive screens you already use on information kiosks and bank machines. Now imagine that technology everywhere, on every surface of your workspace - not just on video screens, but on conference tables, windows, walls, and even paper. For example, Burtner said, a meeting planner might take photos of an exhibit space, upload them to the office, and download them to the conference table, where the images could be easily manipulated and assembled into a 3-D model for everyone around the table to see. "Or a whole wall is a touchable surface that becomes a window to another room, to show whoever you're meeting with, from Seattle to Singapore," Burtner said. "You can also bring up documents and share them on this 'piece of glass.'"

Points of access. Indeed, information sharing will be an integral part of tomorrow's office - via devices that offer employees easy access to data in a variety of file formats. "A trend might be more technical collaboration - more use of technical equipment - where we have more readily accessible points for, say, overhead projectors and AV and fixed-mounted kinds of things," said Troy Thrun, a principal with Sparling, an electrical-engineering specialty-consulting firm in Seattle. "Someone might walk in with their laptop connected up and hold an impromptu collaboration, as opposed to bringing papers."

Cloud computing. Ubiquitous touch-sensitive surfaces and access points will comprise the visible interface of the ultimate application in the office of the future: an all-encompassing storage and retrieval system driven by a function known as "cloud computing." Think of it as the digital ether, an amalgam of every wireless network in the world, bolstered by information-management systems that make your files available to you "anywhere at anytime," according to Burtner. "It lives in the clouds, on the Internet. No matter what device you work with, it's seamless. It synchs across all devices."

Burtner continued: "Maybe you're typing an article on your laptop. When you get home, you can keep typing on your [touch-enabled] kitchen table. That same article is live across all your devices." In that sense, cloud computing is a logical application for the generation now entering the workforce, whose members are already accustomed to manipulating information across a variety of "smart" appliances, including phones, cameras, and PDAs - and always have been. "When we're in discussions with clients about designing their new space," Thrun said, "they are multitasking and working at the same time they're meeting with us. They're half-connected and half-online, doing other things."

Augmented reality. If we seem to be verging on "The Matrix" or some other far-flung science-fiction vision, you haven't seen - or downloaded - anything yet. Among the projects in development at the CIW is "augmented reality," which consists of a pair of "very, very small glasses," Burtner said, that "put a projector on the back of your retina." In other words, images are beamed directly into your eyes. If you're walking or driving somewhere, for example, your augmented-reality system could give you directions by projecting an arrow or line that shows you where to turn. It also could supply you with "meta data" - visual tags that offer helpful information about people you meet, places you visit, and so on.

Desktop assistant. The cornerstone of the workplace of tomorrow, Burtner said, will be the desktop assistant, which is a digitized version of the executive assistant or personal assistant. "It takes all your communication methods," he said, "as well as your schedule and your calendar, and combines them into one space."

When you log in, your desktop assistant will review your calendar and, based on what you have scheduled for that day, prioritize certain communications. "Say you've got a meeting in the next hour about this story, maybe with your editor," Burtner said. "Because of that, the desktop assistant will push forward all your research documents. It will push forward the contacts. Or, imagine you get an e-mail from a colleague about a story you wrote a year ago. You open up the e-mail, and that story automatically surfaces."

Occupational Health
Whiz-bang personal technology is only half the equation when it comes to gadgetry in the office of the future. Just as important will be devices that emphasize wellbeing - for employees and the environment.

Exercise products. At the individual level, Details has partnered with James Levine, an endocrinologist and obesity researcher at the Mayo Clinic, to develop the Walkstation, which is a traditional desk-based workstation equipped with a treadmill. The idea is to disrupt our increasingly sedentary lifestyle by making it easy for people to move around.

During a phone interview for this article, Klipa was strolling on a Walkstation set at 1.4 miles per hour - an activity that wasn't noticeable even after he pointed it out. "If I'm going to be here in my office, I have the option of including movement in that time," said Klipa, who over 48 days of using the Walkstation at his office had walked 120 miles, burned 20,000 calories, and lost six-and-a-half pounds. "This is not an exercise machine. It's not meant to get your heart up. What you really want is a very natural walking movement - what we call 'set it and forget it.'"

If Klipa has his way, the Walkstation will be the first in a series of products that employees can use to shape up in the office of future. "We're really pushing this idea in our research and development efforts much further beyond calorie-burning," Klipa said. "We're really going to start to imagine planning methods and products where people are going to be healthier when they leave the office."

Green spaces. The workplace of tomorrow will also feature a variety of devices that have less of an impact - less of a negative impact, that is - on the world around them. That includes systems that power down when you leave for the day, or even just step away from your office. "It puts the lights out and brings the system down to sleep mode," Burtner said. "So it's a power-saving measure as well."

Likewise, we'll see video screens that allow for much higher-resolution drawing directly onto them - something that design professionals and others who sketch with pencil and paper thus far have eschewed. "As we see screens develop," said Lauren MacLeod, an associate with Sparling's Candela lighting division, "that's going to eliminate some of the paper need as well."

People spend enough time at work - and consume enough resources in the process - that the office of tomorrow will be a huge plank in the sustainability movement. "The building industry is at the core of solving the problem," said Volker Hartkopf, director of the Robert L. Preger Intelligent Workplace project at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics. "When we go to the next step of saying where do people work, how do they commute, where do they live - you have 90 percent of the nation's energy consumed in those three or four decisions."

The Microsoft CIW conducts research and develops products specifically for people who perform "information work" and "knowledge work." Who are these people exactly? "Anybody who authors information online or on a computer, who digests information online, who does analysis online," Burtner said. "If you work on a computer, you're an information worker. It's anyone who physically touches an electronic form of information." Put that way, it seems we'll all be information workers in the office of the future. No matter what we actually do for a living, or where we do it.

Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene.