People work in a variety of different places, doing many different things. We can learn a lot by reviewing some of the more unusual locations where people achieve great and important and even ordinary objectives.
Most of us spend most of our days focused on the design and management of workplaces for relatively traditional office workers – who may be accountants or ad executives or financiers or somebody else who in “the old days” probably would have worked in a standard issue office building. Now those “old-time” office workers are as – or in some cases are more –likely to be working at home or in coworking spaces or toiling away in a place that was nearly unimaginable a few decades ago.
Even before knowledge work was officially named, there were people doing it in places that aren’t at all (really) like offices. Surgeons do a lot of thoughtful, often collaborative, work in operating rooms, for example, and many sorts of project managers need to keep swarms of people organized and performing to their potential far away from wherever their organization is based.
Several years ago, doing observational work in operating rooms, I learned that there are many lessons that non-standard knowledge workplaces can teach us about how the more “typical” ones are best designed and managed. Today, as we create workplaces for future workers, thinking about the fundamental lessons we can pull from “non-offices” where knowledge workers perform well may provide the insights we need to move from “OK” to extraordinary design.
In operating rooms, I learned how important human factors are and how much effective design is based on common sense. During many of the surgeries I observed, people worked with tools that were plugged into electrical outlets (to cauterize incisions, for example), and all those cords could get tangled. Finding the right place to plug everything in was an exercise in high-risk geometry. Dropping things, because of tangled cords, for example, was a real problem because what was dropped wasn’t sterile any longer and often needed to be replaced by a sterile version of itself that an operating room nurse had to hurry from the room to collect. Desktop cord management was a breeze in comparison.
Now, we don’t think so much about cord management when we’re planning workplaces and spend a lot more time trying to support flexibility in use and atmosphere. These were both important for effective operating room design. When surgeries went from straightforward/standard to complex/unexpected the ability to change the mood and switch off potentially distracting background music/change the lighting/etc. and accommodate different sorts of resources – human and otherwise – around the operating table were important. The space around a human body, and particularly around an incision, is relatively constrained compared to the one around a conference table, but in both operating rooms and conference rooms where/how people can be located and oriented in different circumstances – particularly when they all need views of screens presenting views inside a body or of someone working at a distance – is determined using similar laws of gravity, physics and psychology, for example.
Have you ever worked in, designed, or managed a non-standard workplace for knowledge workers? If you have, send me a note at the email address below – let’s discover what we already know that can make future workplaces better.
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.