Lately, for some unknown reason, I’m starting to hear more talk about the office of the future. Maybe people’s minds have jumped from the end of the summer to the end of the year in one fantastic leap – December is when this topic usually rears its head.
Future offices, even ones in use just five years from now, will be packed with technologies that we can’t imagine today. Future offices will also have people in them, at least some people some of the time. And the people in those offices will have brains and psychological profiles very much like ours, for the lifetimes of any buildings being built today, anyway. Our brains and how they work evolve slowly, very, very, very, slowly, at about the same rate as the Grand Canyon gets deeper.
Since the same sorts of brains will work in both today’s workplaces and in those for many thousands of years to come (at least), future workplaces, like today’s workplaces, will need to, at a minimum:
>Signal to workers that the organization values them.Across organizations and cultures, one of the best ways to show people you respect them, the contributions they make and their opinions, is to trust them. Nothing “says” trust like giving people some control over their physical environments. People feel that they have control when they can change ambient conditions, by raising or lowering blinds or selecting where to work within a structure, for example. Too much control makes people tense, however, so options provided need to be tuned to what people are likely to need to do. Six or fewer choices is generally the magic number, so six or fewer work area options are best. In a conference room where lights can be adjusted, five or six presets of light color and intensity are good: one that’s best for focused work, another for socializing, etc.
>Support mental refreshment.People at work will become mentally exhausted in the future, just as they do now. Visual and audio stimuli that we find fascinating, that draw us in and let the parts of our minds that work while we focus rest, help us restock our mental processing power after we’ve depleted it doing knowledge work. Looking at real natural environments or images or videos of real spaces (seen at the level of resolution our eyes normally provide) refreshes us mentally. Art presenting pleasant nature scenes does the same thing. So do fish tanks and looking at water (naturally occurring or man-made, like a fountain). Hearing the sounds of the ocean during pleasant weather, a burbling brook, rustling leaves, or gentle (not aggressive) bird songs is also mentally refreshing.
>Align with principles of biophilic design.That means workplaces need to provide opportunities for some people to sit in places with prospect and refuge (a view out over the nearby area from a space where they feel mentally and physically secure), incorporate natural light and gentle movement (think: a mobile moving in a slight HVAC breeze), and feature green leafy plants, for example.
Future humans, for many, many, many generations to come, will not be very much different from today’s humans. The places where they will work well will need to respond to many of the same design challenges that performance-optimizing workplaces do today.
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 sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.