From Solving the Puzzle [of workplace] to Designing the Game [of work]

What Facebook and Instagram have done to concepts of “friend” and “story” is crime against meaning!

I follow about 30 design accounts on Instagram – interesting architectural forms and diagrams excite me. That said, very often, I find myself rapidly and impatiently tapping through monotonous workplace interior shots mislabeled as “stories” in the hope of finding the “one”.

As I flip through these images, my brain tends to profile each workplace interior under a visual category, and unfairly, label it as “non-original” – white modern art museum-y, industrial and spartan, dynamic and jazz-hand-y, biophilic with lots of plants and wood, homey with splashes of brand color, etc.

OK, workplace interiors might have become repetitive, but maybe true originality is now reflected in the floor plan and spatial relationships? Nah! With some effort, one could also extract patterns of those relationships like I did some years ago:

With right visual and spatial patterns, workplace design becomes like solving a jigsaw puzzle. Of course, there’s satisfaction in finishing a jigsaw puzzle, but you’re rarely, if ever, surprised by the outcome. Everybody’s already seen the picture on the box.

But what if designing workplace was less like solving the jigsaw puzzle and more like designing the game itself? What if the subject of design, that IG story, was as much about work in the workplace?

In a nutshell, how would one go about methodically designing work and the stuff that happens inside the workplace? Here are two methods that I've used before:

One: Designing [for] Socio-Spatial Networks

Almost six years ago, Tahereh and I developed an approach for tracking and redesigning people’s work and learning networks in the physical space. With Professor Schermer and Professor Yoon’s help, we launched our first real-world experiment using a combination of sensors to map employees’ interactions at the boutique Wisconsin-based firm Workshop Architects.

Although, we've done other similar studies since then, one detail made the Workshop experience special for me: Brittagh’s dog, Bear, also wore a sensor and participated in the experiment.

When we analyzed the results, we saw a key difference between Bear’s network and those of everyone else in the office.

While all individual socio-spatial employee networks looked like a dense string ball, Bear’s network resembled a blossoming flower. He didn’t believe in organizational hierarchy, didn’t limit his interactions inside his immediate team, was highly mobile in the office, and most importantly, kept his interactions short and, very, sweet!

I'm not going to get into the topic of redesigning or augmenting networks of work and learning in space. And I want you to know that there are other ways of mapping social and spatial networks in organizations besides using sensors. But I like telling Bear’s story to clients who are curious about aesthetics of work. The story starts the conversation about using workplace design as an opportunity to redesign collaboration patterns inside and across teams.

Two: Designing [for] Team's Project Lifecycle

There is an official history of modern workplace design out there that starts with vilifying Taylorism, soars with celebrating the birth of Bürolandschaft, loses its way in the cubicle farm, and finally finds comfort in the arms of Activity-Based Work.

Despite their differences, they all have a snapshot view about work – a concern about what people do in space at a given time. For example:

Knowing this, last year, we got together with a group of engineers from Fortune 500 companies to co-create our own approach to workplace design.

We started by reframing the snapshot view by adding “time” as the fourth dimension and shifted our perspective from “what people do at a given time in space” to “how work unfolds as a journey and flows in and out of different spaces through time”.

So instead of mapping employee journey, this time we mapped a team's project lifecycle, duration of each project phase, spaces that supported each phase in the work journey, and team members’ mood and style of work during each phase.

Consider implications of this shift in perspective for workplace programming and design for a minute. Imagine knowing which teams should be at the office and when, to make most of their together time, or when they could stay home to get focused work done.

In a nutshell, thoughtfully and methodically pairing social and spatial resources throughout a team's project journey to maximize space utilization, avoid densification to protect employee health, augment project team members’ collaborative habits, and protect folx’ focus time.

Discussion

Workplace design is an opportunity to redesign how work and learning happens inside your organization. There are pretty powerful tools and methods out there that can help just do that during by augmenting the workplace programming and design process. The ones above are the tools and methods I'm familiar with. Would love to learn about things that you've tried or are curious about trying!