There seems to be a growing trend toward seriousness at work. I’ve heard this from many people recently, and one cause may be that increased autonomy must be accompanied by higher accountability (see Work skills for the future: accountability), which in turn makes people more deliberate at work.
As the Coltrane quote suggests, that doesn’t exclude fun, per se, or playfulness, but it is serious play.
As an aspect of this, I have stumbled across several office redesigns where the designers explicitly reject the ‘office as a playground’: the anarchic, Nerf-gun, scooters-in-the-office, free-form placelessness associated with the dot com entrepreneurial spasm of the early 2000s.
A recent example is the design for the New York office of Wieden+Kennedy — the well-known creative agency — by WORK Architecture Company. As they write about the project,