Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Understanding What People Do

I spend a lot of time thinking about what people do for a living, so I was fascinated by a recent article in the New York Times that details how, by working from home, many people are finally coming to understand the jobs of the people they share living spaces with (Lindsay Mannering, “Couples Have a Working-From-Home Revelation: That’s What You Do All Day?, March 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/style/couples-working-from-home-coronavirus.html?searchResultPosition=1).

In the article, Mannering discusses learning more about a “worker” in a relaxed tone that is vastly different from the one often found in programming-related investigations and other research endeavors: “Maybe some of you are staring at your partner right now and wondering what they’re working on, or how they could possibly prefer Microsoft Teams to Slack. Or maybe you’re just sitting there baffled, wondering how it is that you ended up partnered with someone who says ‘Let’s put a pin in that’ with alarming regularity.”

One of the fundamental points Mannering makes is that even those who are both curious and well-intentioned can have a difficult time understanding what someone else does, how they add value to whatever organization pays them. She also makes it clear that even people doing the same sort of thing, such as talking on the phone with a colleague, can prefer to do so in different ways.

Developing an understanding of what people do in the course of their workday is at the root of lots of programming research efforts as well as more general, not-project-specific investigations. And it is not easy – particularly when employees are concerned about their professional futures (which many seem to have been, even before the pandemic). Employees also, often, want to tell you what they know they need in their office going forward. These employee impressions are handy for shedding light on interpretations of current situations, but are generally not directly applicable because, except in rare cases, users are not designers of the various sorts who can best integrate a collection of elements to create a space; rather, users usually have different areas of expertise, such as sales, or marketing, or accounting.

Learning what people do that justifies their current, and future, paychecks is challenging and often requires indirect, even, sometimes, odd sounding interview/survey questions that get at professional fundamentals. These questions can seem silly to finance-types (I was a finance major, so I feel free to discuss this employee subclass frankly). Even financiers, however, start to feel better about programming and other research projects when past information gathering successes, and the lines of investigation that lead to those successes, are shared with them.

Mannering’s article is fun and quick to read, and can be a handy “setting the research scene”-type resource for people who manage, study or design workplaces. It’s great for sharing with anyone who is not convinced that research is a good use of resources.

Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com). Research Design Connections reports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. 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.