Human beings need to be able to have privacy when they think they need it—it’s a cornerstone of good mental health.
“Privacy” and being “distraction free” can seem like the same thing and the terms are often used interchangeably, but here we’re talking about privacy in the strict sense of its meaning to psychologists. Privacy is not being seen or heard by other people or seeing or hearing others—or at least not being able to tell what other people are doing (you’re looking at them through frosted glass, for example), or pick out the words that they’re speaking (a perfectly silent space is impossible, and close approximations of it stresses us out). Having privacy can be considered a sort of environmental control. In a setting simply without distractions, someone else can arrive at any time, bursting the privacy bubble. When someone has privacy, visual and acoustic access to the space is determined by the person having the private moment.
When people have privacy, they order their thoughts, make sense of recent events in their lives, and prepare to re-enter the social whirl. We all need to do this “brain housekeeping” regularly. Without being able to have privacy when we feel we need it, our brains start to misfire, like a skipping record on a turntable (a classic reference for all the oldsters out there), stress builds, mental performance declines, people are not especially nice to other people—none of which is very desirable in a workplace or anywhere else.
The need to be distraction free, at least from time to time, is something workplace designers and managers think about a lot, just like everyone trying to use offices at home, onsite, or anywhere else.
It’s important to recognize that both individuals and groups can need privacy occasionally—but when groups need privacy, all present have the same goals and a core underlying motivation for being together—whether that’s to celebrate a victory of some sort without seeming like bad sports or to figure out what the re-org really means.
We know when we need to “get away” for a moment, but even for one individual (let alone a workforce) it’s impossible to predict how often or when the need for privacy will arise, but it will increase with stress levels.
Supporting privacy means, in practical terms, making sure that there are some retreats onsite for people with walls to the ceiling and floor and a door, all without windows that allow co-workers to peak in, although windows to gardens, etc., can be great. Sometimes building codes require windows in doors or interior walls and in that case they must be present, but some designer cleverness may be in order. For example, when problematic windows are in place, blinds or curtains of some sort may be able to cover them. If the blinds and curtains can be moved for views into private spaces from outside the space in an emergency situation—maybe via a simple lever or magnet or a building wide system that raises all blinds when the fire alarm goes off or something similar—privacy can still be provided.
Private spaces are not primarily work spaces although, being realistic, they’re apt to be snapped up by people writing reports, or planning to make lots of telephone calls to wedding planners, early every morning. Private spaces are places for mental stabilization and refreshment—and as such can benefit from all of the mental revitalization aids this column covers regularly, such as green leafy plants and nature images, real (via windows) or in art, moving or still, as well as natural soundscapes and floods of glare-free natural light (from clerestory windows, if necessary).
Private retreats can be a particular boon to the neurodiverse; the spaces multitask. Private areas can be places where people with ADHD, dyslexia, etc. can revitalize before returning to work at their full potential, as stress can accentuate some forms of neurodiversity. Many of the neurodiverse in the workforce have developed ways to deal with their diversity that they may not want others to observe and private spaces can support those activities. For example, someone with ADHD who may have found that they as an individual do best at digesting the contents of a long report by looking at all of the pages in advance and having some idea of what’s to come before beginning to read, will, if the report is delivered to them in paper form (probably not likely anymore, but let’s assume so for the course of this example) want to flip through all the pages alone because co-workers seeing them doing so might think they don’t take the report seriously, or something else. A person with another neurodiversity who usually has no issue with processing information at their workspace, may on a stressful day when things seem to be “out of whack” need to pull some sort of tool from a bag and use if for a while to plow through material on a screen before equilibrium is restored—and would prefer to do so without an audience.
Everyone needs a private place to spend time from time-to-time. In the words of many a hotel door hanger (and Hollywood star), “Privacy, please.”
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.