Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Sharing, By Design

Even though food sharing – think coworker birthdays, holiday celebrations, and party leftovers are widespread at work, workplaces themselves often seem poorly prepared to support them. Sure, there’s a break area somewhere, but those spaces are often shared by people from different workgroups. Food sharing events are often very local affairs; people bring in items to share with those they work with most closely. Food-to-share doesn’t get as far from the seats of the people for whom it’s intended as that break area.

Flat surfaces outside planned, formalized break zones that are large enough for spreading out shared food (and aren’t being put to some other use) are often in short supply. Ones located close enough to an electrical outlet so special items that need to be kept warm can be heated without an extension cord are particularly rare.

Since food sharing is epidemic at some points in the year and sporadic throughout the rest of the year, designing in spaces that support it is important. These areas are essential to group welfare because there are few better ways for groups to bond than over a shared plate of at-work dips and chips.

Food for staff members working the all-nighter while a customer cuts over from the old system to the new one.

Locating places where people can share food is a challenge. They can draw people and encourage conversation, which can be distracting. They can also repel people, those determined to stick to a healthy diet or who are in a rush and just want to get where they need to go without being slowed by colleagues socializing who they will encourage them to take a mini-break. The location of the food-share hubs affects how people travel through offices, which can influence casual encounters, awareness of what others are up to, etc.

The location of a food-share site in relation to a shared water cooler is particularly problematic as water coolers also shape the paths people travel through an area, and many people who are drinking water are avoiding the shared food.

Locating share hubs near the circulation spaces that surround a team’s space can work well, particularly if the orientation and layout of the area containing the food encourages those gathering to face away—at least some—from coworkers while they eat and chat.

Also, people seeking to avoid contact with people eating and the food available need to be able to exit the area without walking near the food work. Some visual and acoustic shielding can be handy near food hubs. Chairs aren’t useful here – they create a whole different sort of space. Hubs are for the quick and unplanned interactions that keep small groups fused into teams with common goals and expectations, while spaces with chairs are for more sustained and relatively complex gatherings.

Locating spaces for food sharing in a place where someone often works makes them the food czar, which has a dampening effect on visits, while simultaneously hindering their professional performance.

Group hubs are useful year round; when food is absent, people visit them briefly to share ideas. They help maintain the bonds between core teammates that are often frayed by blizzards of meetings with people from other groups. As a species, we still bond via physical contact, and that’s never clearer than when we’re huddled with our teammates around a collection of foods that we know we should be ignoring, but won’t.

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.