Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Design in Action

Humans are addicted to trying to figure out what’s going on in their world. A lot of that sleuthing happens during meetings. Recently, many have been pondering the image of a meeting at Mar-a-Lago related to an American military strike in Syria, shown here: www.cnn.com. The CNN headline is indicative of our intrinsic curiosity: “What This Photo of Trump’s War Room Tells Us.” Trump’s gathering is attracting a lot more attention than many meetings do, but the same sorts of analyses take place at every one. “Who’s sitting where?” and “How is the meeting room designed?” are perennial questions. The first one gets at individual/social dynamics, who has what kind of power now, for example, and the second is ferretting out information at a slightly higher level. It probes, “what does this organization value?” Analyzing who means what to Trump, who sits in the leader position at the head of …