After the beginning of the year, and sometimes even before that new year kicks off, the idea of cleaning up and getting rid of stuff is top-of-mind. We seem to have a real need to live the motto, “New year, clean start.”
It’s hard to fault cleanliness, or envision workplaces that are too clean, but “office clutter” is more difficult to design for and manage.
Cleaning is good for our bodies (often) and our minds. A physically clean environment sends messages to us about our culture values. It signals that whoever’s in charge is an intelligent steward of the resources available to them – and that users respect each other and the organization that’s brought them together – so using materials that are cleanable (by mere mortals, without special super powers) and wear well is an important design consideration. Coffee cup rings, ground-in birthday cake residue, on-cabinet handprints (you get the idea), are all a no-no. Don’t think people really care? Consider all the articles you’ve read about first corporate impressions and the opinions job interviewees form of organizations based on their bathrooms, just for starters.
Office clutter is a more difficult situation to resolve. People are tense in spaces that either have too much stuff in them or not enough. We like a happy medium, visual complexity-wise. There are all sorts of complicated mathematical equations for determining when that pleasant middle ground has been reached, but they are largely unusable, even by researchers, because of their complexity. All that complicated math has shown, however, that a Frank Lloyd Wright home interior generally has the sort of moderate visual complexity that’s the design goal. Roughly matching a space to the usual Wright residential interior’s visual complexity, either when a place is new and being developed or during an annual purge, is possible.
And creating a space that’s clutter free, and able to be made clutter free because of reasonable numbers of cabinets with doors that can’t be seen though, drawers, and other “contents view blocking” storage, is a good idea, for lots of reasons. When we’re in spaces that seem cluttered, rigorous scientific research, the kind you can trust and apply with confidence, has shown that our professional performance is degraded and we eat more unhealthy foods, for example.
The stuff we choose to surround ourselves with, those photos and knick knacks that we add to our nearby world, sends messages to others about what we value about ourselves – and reminds us about those prized “features” at the same time. This signaling happens for both individuals and groups. That means organizationally meaningful symbols, which user research identifies, need to be designed into a space. And individual users, and small groups, must be able to “talk with objects” as well.
So clean up thoroughly and de-clutter thoughtfully. Your mental and physical wellbeing depend on it.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.