Sherry Turkle is certainly not the first person to lament the fact that people just don’t have conversations the way they used to – in words, face-to-face, and about topics that matter. Her recent book on this topic, “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age”, is attracting a great deal of attention, however, and will surely lead to lots of designer-client discussions.
To make her point regarding the importance of workplace conversations – and Turkle does in the course of her book address talking in other places – she reports on Waber’s work, which determined that: “face-to-face conversation leads to higher productivity and is also associated with reduced stress. Call centers are more productive when people take breaks together; software teams produce programs with fewer bugs when they talk more. And Waber’s studies had disappointing news for those who equate email and talk: The ‘conversation effect’ doesn’t work the same way for online encounters. What matters is being together face-to-face…There is a business case for conversation.”
Turtle goes on to report that, “Sophisticated organizations design physical and social environments that support face-to-face conversation. But the most artful design will be subverted if a work culture, at its heart, does not understand the unique value of conversation.”
Turkle’s text does not just lament the end of the conversation and support its reintroduction into our lives; she repeatedly and in some depth discusses supporting conversation through design. These sections are one of the most important reasons for people who design and manage workplaces to read this text.
As Turkle details, “Create sacred spaces for conversation…Design your environment to protect yourself against unnecessary interruptions…Increasingly, there is demand in universities for study and lounge space that is Wi-Fi free. When we wired the universities, every last room of them, we didn’t consider that we were making it harder for students to attend to their peers or their own thoughts…in offices, we can make space for conversation without digital connection…Setting aside a space communicates that, in this place, people pay attention to each other. They can take a breath.”
Design in breathing spaces – and be ready, soon your clients will be asking for them.
Sherry Turkle. 2015. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Press: New York.
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.