Welcome to October — the month of ghosts, jack-o’-lanterns, cobwebs, and wild costumes. If you’ve never worn a ridiculous costume at work with your peers, are you even enjoying the season? Whether you prefer things to be playful or spooky, let’s admit that there are a lot of “scary” things we deal with in the workplace.
Aside from cockroaches, spiders, and the pumpkin spice obsessed crowd, what really scares you? Does the thought of unrealistic deadlines or a surprise Zoom meeting when you’re lounging in pajamas make your skin crawl? Does commuting to an office five days a week or the volatile economic and political climate make you cringe? Is there a component of design that is unsettling or fear-inducing for you or the users of your spaces? It may be some or all of the above.
Our design profession is responsible for crafting spaces that evoke feelings and emotions such as joy, wonder, or possibly even fear. In the spirit of the spooky season, I asked Jose Jordan, Interiors Leader and Principal at DLR Group, if any part of his work felt “scary.” With a background in elevating communities and bringing trauma-informed, restorative justice design practices to civic and justice spaces, he replied “YES! Public spaces are very scary.”
Jordan painted a vivid picture of a courthouse — one of his common project types — as a potentially overwhelming space where people already bring their feelings of stress, trauma and fear. Typically, you walk into a noisy, echoing space, greeted by intimidating security machines and armed officers while you fumble to shed your jacket and shoes. There’s nowhere to sit, nowhere for children, and little guidance through the maze of hallways and doorways. Spooky, right?
“A lot of public spaces are scary because they fail to consider the human experience. When designed with an unwelcome, hostile, and beige precedent, they fail to provide proper resources for communities,” said Jordan. He passionately explained how design can transform a space like a courthouse by acknowledging the feelings, emotions, and needs of its users and by catering to our most influential human senses – sight, sound, and touch. “By engaging our senses, we can craft an experience that helps deescalate stress and trauma with a space that does not feed a person’s stressors,” he added.
Jordan also explained how minor experiences make a big difference. Sound, for instance, can be controlled through proper acoustics and managing reverberation, while sight can be addressed through color, views of nature, and ensuring that wayfinding and visual scale helps people feel empowered and not disregarded. Design can address the sense of touch with tactile materials like the softness or feeling of the flooring under foot or the handles of a door.
While some government spaces have a historical air of grandeur or monumentality that can feel intimidating, Jordan said, “These are tools in our toolkit to craft an intuitive and softened experience that can tell someone, ‘I see you, I hear you, and I acknowledge you within this design.’”
Lastly, I asked Jordan about whether public spaces like these can truly be free of fear. His response perfectly acknowledged the much needed empathy of designers: “Perhaps the fear isn’t in the space itself, but from what we bring with us. The fear is the anxiety and anticipation of what’s to come or of the unknown. The fear is with us. Can a building or a design support an experience that helps us process that fear? Absolutely. Design minimizes the impacts of fear itself.”
The best way to approach fear is to acknowledge it, reflect on it, and confront it directly. For Jordan, this meant understanding the diverse range of users, and responding to their human needs by designing for user agency and empowerment. As craftspeople of the built environment, we have a responsibility to consider the users of our spaces and the emotions they may evoke.
Not all fears can be addressed by engaging our senses or designing our way through the challenge, nor are we or our profession responsible for all environmental fears, bad actors or bad behavior. However, confronting a few ghosts and cobwebs in our professional lives with creativity and fresh perspective can be beneficial.
Can five days in the office help you build connections with colleagues or gain new insights from audiobook learning on the commute? Will Zoom pajama mishaps make you more relatable and human (there is beauty in our flaws, after all). Can rapid change, technology, diversity, and “scary” design opportunities make us more empathetic, creative and humble? It all depends on how you look at it. Perhaps the real power lies in our ability to shift perspectives and to turn these “October Workplace Scaries” into a more optimistic view of ourselves and the future.
If you missed Jose Jordan on the Imagine a Place podcast, it’s worth a listen!
Editor’s Note: Maria VanDeman, NCIDQ, IIDA, is an accomplished workplace advisor at OFS, interior designer, published children’s book author and advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. With a passion for helping people and designing for human needs, Maria strives to make a positive impact on the world through her work and mentorship. Connect with Maria on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mariavandeman