Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Time to Battle Burnout
It’s the sentence that’s on everyone’s lips: “I feel so burned out.” Many of the people uttering the phrase-of-the-moment are not just repeating what they’ve heard around the water cooler (which for many has become virtual). Their honest impression of their own mental condition is, really and truly, “burned out.” To some extent design can help counter and even to some extent reverse burnout – but please don’t infer from this comment that a few environmental modifications can boost people all the way from not being in terribly good shape mental health-wise to pristine mental health – the sorts of changes in burnout we can hope to achieve via design boil down to somewhat lessening burnout severity, not eliminating it. Design is useful – but not magical. As you face the bleary eyes of burned-out colleagues or clients for whom you’re developing new spaces consider the following “fixes”: Comfortable numbers …