MulvannyG2 managing principal Alan Feltoon thinks DC can be the birthplace of the office of the future. His firm, along with his son Zac's Brooklyn-based industrial design firm Zac & Co, recently won HP/Microsoft's Smart Office Challenge, a competition that charged design shops with rethinking traditional office setups. Alan says his team wanted to create an office environment that was relatively inexpensive, seamless, efficient, and of course, cool.

Here's what they came up with: an 8x8 unit, called MIMIC, that folds out into what you see above. Alan says the unit (still just a prototype) would help companies cope with smaller space requirements while also allowing privacy in the increasingly popular open workplace format. The unit can be easily moved around an office, Alan tells us, and those blue glass squares on the side can even be moved around with an app. Alan, Zac, and the team received their award at the Alt Design Summit a few weeks ago in Salt Lake City, and as Alan says, "the level of interest from the design community was way beyond what we thought."