Bear with the shameless self-promotion for a moment while I make a point.
Yes, that is me on the cover of a local commercial real estate publication. It came out last month and something about the interview with me inspired them to put me on the cover. Good times. The point of the interview was a conversation about how the modern workplace has changed, and will continue to change, and how my firm is beginning to experiment on itself to navigate this change and determine those workplace innovations that work, and those that do not. This is as much about organizational dynamics and ergonomics as it is about technology and communications, and it is part of a much larger exercise we are undertaking to develop a comprehensive program and master plan for our office and studio environments. By 2010 my firm will be in a new environment, and ideally one that we own, and this programmatical exercise will inform the type of space we ultimately need to occupy. It is also the inception of a longer term plan to treat our entire office environment as a laboratory, to experiment on ourselves, and be able to model different workplace innovations for our clients by using our own environments as proof of concept. Currently, we have an experimental area of our office, featured in the magazine, that is a studio dedicated to one comprehensive project, and we have used this studio to co-locate the central project team of 8-10 individuals. The space is flexible, surrounded by collaborative tools, and emphasizes the immediacy of communication. It is not private, it is not perfect, but it is a valuable experiment and the quality of work from this team has greatly benefited as a result.
The point that I want to make is that without having experienced and experimented with workplace innovations and organizational concepts it is impossible to appropriately represent them to our clients. For lack of a better expression, this would be “walking the talk.” A significant focus on this blog has been the concept of “the workplace of the future”, but what does that really mean? It means an environment that is about the work to be done and not about place. It means that substantial thought goes into the way an organization works, into its culture and business strategy, and how a work environment can manifest in support of these key aspects. It means that the conservative notion of office organization and layout is not only increasingly irrelevant, but actually counterproductive to the longer term success of a company. At its core, this is the physical embodiment within the environments that we create of superior occupant quality, of environments that are supportive of work and task while also enhancing health, well-being, and ultimately productivity. We know that an environment that we create today may be challenged anywhere from one to five years from now, that is how fast organizations and the markets within which they operate can change. The challenge to us is how we build in flexibility and anticipate this change so that we create value on behalf of our clients that allows their work environments to grow and change in advance of the demands of their markets and their people, without sacrificing the occupant quality of the environment. This is workplace innovation, and at its core involves a thorough understanding of organizational dynamics, occupant quality, product design, communications, materials technology, cultural analysis, and of an organization’s long term business strategy. These are the catalysts to the creation of successful work environments, and it mandates a rethinking of legacy notions of office and a focus on innovations that begin with an individual person’s needs and experiences as they relate to the physical environment.
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January 5th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Nice work in the continuing series. It’s ironic to many that what you are finding is what was discovered in the 70’s in modern office design, and it is coming back into play after 30+ years of the sidetracking of design by post-modernism, a new decorative movement, the celebrity architect and his museums, the sustainability movement and its Pavlovian conditioning of designers, and the attempt to teach architects to emote about productivity and the culture of work.
It’s always been about the occupant. We can, quite easily, measure what they like, what makes them feel the way they want to, and the value of stimulus and stasis in their environments. But getting there does not seem to intrigue either the design or the business community.
Keep swimming upstream.
January 5th, 2008 at 9:41 am
A common topic of discussion for our team is exactly that, that we have “rediscovered” what was being talked about thirty years ago. How architecture moved so far from being human centered is certainly disconcerting, that we are finding our way back and working to always design first from the perspective of the individual is an exercise in putting design back on the proper path… that of meeting the needs of human beings.
Just this week an associate left an enormous book at my desk titled “Human Factors in Design.” It is from 1974 and only confirms your point, that what we are determining is important today was in fact the core to smart, effective workplace design back in the 1970’s