Digg recently shared the floor plans of offices/workplaces from fictional television programs, drawn up by Bizdaq (http://digg.com/2017/tv-business-floor-plans).
Looking at these floor plans is a lot of fun. Almost all of us enjoy a little television, at least from time to time, and perusing the floor plans from shows like The Office or Mad Men is a way to combine a guilty pleasure with something that seems more worthwhile: considering the design options others have chosen.
Reviewing these floor plans, and thinking about on-camera offices, can definitely payoff professionally.
The office sets used by television shows generate our culture’s common language for discussing workplaces. Conversations regularly refer to the design of these spaces and one set of television offices can be explained to people who haven’t seen a particular show with comparisons to other sets. The same goes for offices being designed in real life – references to on-camera offices can help clarify what the new places will be like – and those comparisons can be particularly useful since many people without training have trouble understanding architectural drawings. What people see on TV (and in movies) helps form their expectations about what is appropriate, useful, etc.
Younger people’s only exposure to knowledge workplaces may be through television offices. They may have no experience working in offices before they graduate or even visiting them before they head off to their first day of “real” work. Their expectations of offices, like those of people who’ve grown up outside the United States but within the clutches of U.S. TV, are, at least in part, formed by these shows. Office sets provide information that can be used to answer questions such as “How should I work?” and “What are the best places for me to do my job?”
Visit the Digg web address above for fun, and more. Pay attention to the office sets on television programs and to those shown in movies. The people who work in the spaces you design and manage do.
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.