Break out of the cubicle at communal work spaces.

Offering trendy drinks, hip decor and social events, communal offices strive to inspire connections and creativity

Co-working spaces offer a hipper take on office life.

Remember Dad’s office? Once or twice a year, probably during Presidents’ Day, the old man would bring you to work with him so you could see what the heck he did all day. You’d sit in his desk chair and he’d spin you around till you got dizzy; you’d drink from a paper cup at the water cooler and peek into the break room, where colleagues were pecking at their bag lunches or taking a smoke break.

To your tiny, unformed eyes, this all probably seemed impossibly grown up and glamorous, like something out of a screwball comedy where women wore heels, men wore hats, and everyone traded zingers all day.

But think back: Wasn’t it kind of … depressing? The funnest part was a desk chair? People smoked indoors? And, oh, that sad, wilted tuna sandwich in tin foil. Let’s be honest, offices are a drag. Even the kindergarten-inspired workspaces of the digital age, with their intra-floor slides, beanbag chairs and kombucha taps are, in the words of my former boss, velvet coffins. They’re comfy places to lie down and die.

But what if you can blow up the office, send workers back into the wild where they can feel the cool breeze of freedom? Think how productive they’ll be! Imagine how “outside-the-box” their ideas will be! They might even be (gasp!) happy.

This is where co-working comes in. Co-working spaces offer mobile workers and small companies desks, conference rooms, shared Wi-Fi and printers, and sometimes perks, for a daily or monthly rental fee. According to one survey, there will be 10,000 co-working spots worldwide by the end of this year. These range from massive franchises like WeWork, which has a reported $16 billion valuation and locations throughout the United States and in countries like Israel and China, to more bespoke, local concerns with names like Parisoma and Makeshift Society. 42Floors, a website that connects companies to available office space, lists four pages of co-working spaces in the Bay Area at a range of prices. Co-working spaces let workers feel some sense of collegiality without the high overhead of an office and the lab rat-like structure of cubicles, meetings and other traditional trappings.

Co-working is a natural fit for the Bay Area. Like communal living in the ’60s, co-working makes perfect sense in a region where space is at a premium and utopian fantasies abound. And since a business can go from two people to, say, $16 billion in value nearly overnight, it makes sense for entrepreneurs to seek out spaces where they can start small and dream big — or launch their own spaces.

Industrial designer Yves Béhar and two partners are already onto the next co-working iteration, creating a space called Canopy that’s coming to Pacific Heights this fall that will be (according to a release) “a beautiful and authentic local workplace, void of trivial distractions.”

Besides, the next “disruptive” company probably won’t grow out of a drab cubicle farm like the one where your parent toiled: It just may come from one of the following places where people, ideas and design meet. Then again, these might turn out to be cooler, handmade velvet coffins, only without the lids. Only time — and the fickleness of trends — will tell. We visited four co-working spaces (and one that existed before the term was invented) to find out more. Tell your dad.