“Designing with users in mind” is a mantra that’s been chanted by designers for many decades.
Around the world, users are poked and prodded, interviewed and surveyed, as design projects move forward. In the best of circumstances, what they’ve said to the design team, via one format or another, has some effect on what ultimately gets developed.
Even when the space designed really and truly supports the work that users do on the day those users move in, there’s no certainty that it will continue to do so as time passes – not only because the things people are doing at work can evolve.
Workers themselves can physically change their workplaces in ways that affect how they use them. Some of those changes are more conscious and some less. Ultimately, whether changes are conscious or unconscious doesn’t matter; however, a change is a change, and they can all make a difference.
Consider, for example, food altars. A food altar has nothing to do with the worship of cupcakes or kale. A food altar is what some in the research world call the place where treats live in a workplace. A food altar is the place where people put special food during holiday seasons or special somethings to mark a coworker’s birthday, for example. Sometimes a food altar is temporary, set up on the birthday person’s desk for a single day. But often the altar is located in a particular place for an extended period of time. The food altar acquires a permanent location; it is where at-work food to be shared just belongs, although there is not food on the food altar all of the time.
Some people at some times become particularly concerned about what they’re eating. These individuals may chart courses for themselves through a workplace that avoids – or on other occasions intentionally intersects – with the food altars.
So, workplaces that have been developed so that travel through them increases the likelihood that just the right sorts of people “run across” just the right sorts of other people has distorted travel routes. The “right” people no longer find themselves in the desired discussions, for instance, because they are not moving through the space in anticipated ways.
Food altars can thereby result in lots of careful design planning being for naught.
The same sort of “use evolution” can happen throughout a workplace. A new technological capability – or coffee option – available in only one employee lounge can increase the use of that lounge beyond capacity, amplifying noise levels beyond “ability to have a conversation” levels, for example. An existing technology might be better used in one part of a building than another – Wi-Fi strength/speed can vary from place to place, for example – again changing planned use patterns. You get the idea.
Users ultimately will prevail; they’ll use the spaces provided to them in ways they think make their lives better. Unfortunately, all of the ways they will choose to use the environments available to them can’t be anticipated by a design team in advance. We can thoughtfully consider probable activities and client-lead modifications in spaces we develop, but inevitably some will be un-anticipatable. And there is only so much flexibility that can be built into an environment.
We have to give space-use power to users since we all go home, eventually. Transferring control to users, inevitably, means we can’t be too deterministic, or completely certain, about how well anything we’re designing will work for users, especially long-term. In the end, the users run their own shows and their actions after we leave, working within and without the capabilities we supply them via design, determine the apparent success of environments developed.
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.