When I’m cold I cannot think.

Not like in totally blank mind – that would be actually beneficial – I’d pop my head in the fridge to restart the disk every now and then, instead of attempting meditation, at which I am hopeless.

No, it’s just the thought “I AM COLD” invading the landscape in solid blocks until it blocks out everything else.

I cannot think when I’m hot. Then a similar process unfolds, but it is more about melting and evaporation when it comes to analogies.

Noisy environments stress me out of focus, strange smells distract me, occasionally give me headaches, and unfortunate perfume combinations do make me avoid the offender.

Lack of oxygen makes me yawn; it’s not that I’m bored to death by the area schedule…

Bad light quality makes me struggle and squint; glare tires me and blinds me – quite literally. As my brief job description would be “translating multidimensional semantics into solvable geometry problems” in front of a screen, I make every effort possible to keep my eyes and mind in good shape and my hands warm.

With over 15 years of office experience I surely am a survival expert by now. Remember to keep a wool-over in my drawer, and a presentable t-shirt under my top, know the powers of a good cup of tea and how to bring back my hands to life under the hand dryer. And yet cannot help but wonder how we can never get room conditions right?

Boo, what a daisy! If you have reached this point you surely sneer, thinking how you brave the same overstated conditions every day at your office. And who knows, maybe worse? It’s true that we have achieved tremendous evolution in work ergonomics between the Industrial Revolution and the seventies, and then not much more.

Trouble is, were I a daisy – or any other plant, people would know exactly which conditions will make me blossom or wane. And some kind soul would even make sure my soil’s pH is just right, would know how much sunshine and shade I can support, which temperatures are optimal, which season is my best and so-o-o-o-o on. When you buy a plant it comes with a prescriptive tag, when you hire a human, we don’t. Most of us don’t even realise that the environment plays a huge role for our performance. Those who do – sometimes leave jobs because of the office. Even I’ve done it once – chose my eyesight before the glaring view.

And let’s spill the beans after all – I really want to get what can be improved in workplace design, because I want to design better. Yes, we have been laying out open plan offices since the eighties and still sing praises to their flexibility and interconnectedness. But should be fair and acknowledge a thing or two. First they are noisy – no matter how carefully you plan the acoustic panels, everybody will know when you have a private phone call. Then they are draughty – the biggest culprit for daily discomfort is the air-conditioning. Many a frozen neck and back originate from the vicious air current. How many teams have shared the flu of that colleague, who came in sick? And thirdly – they are homogenous in terms of aesthetics – read “anonymous”. One make desks and chairs, one make machines, clever pattern grey carpet, modular tile ceiling – off we go. Even worse – read “boring”. And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the opposite of stimulating? If the soil of a crop had been depleted you wouldn’t expect it to yield much, would you?

 

 

Speaking of crops – the current practice suggests we are dealing with mono-cultures. We still design for that average standard person that doesn’t exist. In his newyorker.com article Anthony Lydgate questions the sexist bias of ASHRAE thermal comfort calculations – based on male 40 year old workers in business suits, but in my experience gender is not the only under-recognised variable. Having spent the best part of my working time in international teams of multicolour climatic and cultural backgrounds, I have witnessed plenty of examples where personality and geographical provenance played a bigger role in temperature preference than gender or clothing.

So what can be done? We are so very diverse individuals and with the accelerating process of globalisation the mix will only complicate further. A lot is said about providing personalised control over aspects of indoor environment, but the majority of the existing infrastructure simply doesn’t have the required flexibility.

Let’s review some options:

 

• The low hanging fruit: Map it!

The first step will be to recognise the issue and start applying local rules within each context, overwriting the standards where necessary. A team of Swedish and Spanish will never agree on the thermostat position, so it’s better to apply consensus and mediation instead of quoting the common EU norms.

Then we could collect the unique sensory preferences of each individual user of the space in a dataset. That requires each of us to know what our best operating conditions are, so might heighten our overall awareness of wellbeing. Many of us already monitor the number of steps taken daily, the levels of blood pressure and heart rate, the calories and cholesterol – a step further will be to observe how these correlate to the surroundings.

For example – faced with significant thermal discomfort in the office recently, I made the effort to explore the issue in depth – bought a device and for a couple of weeks monitored the temperature fluctuations at my desk. I wasn’t able to spot the problem immediately – even though the air temperature was merely 18°C in the mornings and typically didn’t reach the prescriptive 22°C before lunch; it couldn’t explain the creeping freezing cold feeling. On the second day I took readings from the surface of the adjacent external wall and found the sucker – it was a rainy day so it kept a stable 16°C and inevitably drew heat off me, making me work in my jacket. In addition to the clarification of the problem, the experiment demonstrated that my personal comfort zone lies within the limits of 23-25°C and finally put a number on my preferences. Moving away from this desk had the combined virtue of limiting the craving for sweet, spicy and fatty foods too.

Similarly we could monitor the various conditions within the space – map the microclimate zones, research the isoclines of noise, the archipelagos of darkness and light, the tides of glare and odours. Check their circadian flow as well – many conditions change within the same zone during the hours. Luckily there are more and more accessible devices that can screen and reveal them.

And finally we could overlay all these layers of information to provide accurate base for choice to each of us. Chances are some corners will be more desirable than others but better knowledge of personal parameters will mean people won’t just follow an assumed scale of goodness according to their level in the hierarchy. We would rather have realistic expectations and might swap the draughty corner office for a slot near the coffee machine.

Sorted? Not really – as physical characteristics represent just a portion of the picture why we resonate with some spaces and not with others. But it’s a good starting point.

 

• Cancel the problem altogether: Remote!

Mapping the zones is great, but following strictly individual preferences cannot be practical at all times – most people are grouped by task, project and department and rarely anyone pays attention to his/her levels of distress caused by inadequate space conditions. We are largely unaware how affected we are by our environment. Considering the health and wellbeing impact – it’s about time to wake up.

I’m sure many will recognise the feeling of sheer misery when you realise at the end of a particularly busy day that moving your head hurts, drinking water hurts, standing up hurts – courtesy of your bad posture and the air-con. Another common issue is the allelopathic influence of certain colleagues, often well mitigated with distance.

More and more technological advances allow us to collaborate in real time as a team, while physically in multiple remote locations. It definitely is a way around office climatic and climactic hazards and should be adopted more often. Who wouldn’t enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere in the world? Sites like nomadlist.com rank the best cities to work from.

Frankly some professions are still harder to accommodate with distance-indifferent means of communication than others, but if we were to cater for all the applicable cases, the required amount of office area would drop significantly.

The bigger issue is that managers are still largely reluctant to drop direct visual control over their employees – in their mind the phrase “I’m working from home today” sounds like “I’m taking a day off”. In the same time researchers argue that workaholics shouldn’t be left on their own for exactly the opposite reason – not knowing when to stop, they risk burning out and cannot strike a healthy balance. In her article for the Guardian, Esther Canonico wonders if working in isolation without enough face-to-face time, doesn’t hamper successful career progression. After exploring some of the pitfalls of flexible arrangements, she concludes that companies need to develop better communication and management techniques to support the growing percentages of remote workers.

While I believe individual choices should be available and respected, I wholeheartedly support the idea, as it has more positive consequences than negative traits. For example one of the huge problems of the big cities – commuting to work – could be dramatically downsized and many more local activities could flourish within the newly-discovered spare time of the busy-bees. “In gaining time we shall remedy everything”…

Go digital nomads!

 

• Half-way relay: Co-working!

Ever since we entered the new millennium we seem to be “in transition” – constantly revising our knowledge, ideas, reshuffling our careers, recovering our phone books, relocating and repurposing our lives. Eventually the office space providers caught up with the trend and as of last year many serious agencies embarked on ventures in the high seas of young entrepreneurship – offering those start-ups their so badly needed pay-as-you-use office slots.

A brave and timely move, as more and more millennials prefer to chase their dream from a crate in a basement than polishing some corporate vision in a grey-carpeted neon warehouse.

Typically these places house such a diverse mix of enterprising spirits that the sheer buzz of ideas in cross-pollination makes them feel instantly vibrant and attractive to the newcomer. The danger of corporate lenders entering the market is the “normalisation” they usually bring to unruly independent movements. Please! This time be careful and don’t kill the magic bug with overdose of standardisation and sleeking out!

The office-hoteling and hot-desking concept is not new, but only now technology allowed it to achieve a well-rounded fruition. Co-working and maker spaces are a welcome addition to the work-from-home paradigm as they respond to the need for regular team gatherings, offering very flexible arrangements with regards to time, space and cost.

One of the less apparent benefits for designers is the accelerated user feedback loop, meaning we could explore preferences and conditions among multiple users, which previously would take years, within the span of few months. So in terms of design research – they could represent those long-awaited labs, allowing us to find better solutions to various problems. The case for mapping in this context is actually stronger as space is constantly reinvented by default and individual users could easily follow their best performance prescriptions.

 

• Even faster: By the hour!

Possibly the newest and by far my favourite hybrid option is the formula “my-home-is-your-office”, used by the likes of officeriders.com, where anyone could lend their living room for a few hours to professional users. How about your internet connection and home printer allowing you to earn a few bucks on the side while you toil in the office? Brilliant, n’est pas!

The site even suggests uses like photo-shoots, freelance coworking and conferences.

The only downside? It’s still available only in France, but the good news is: the creators aim to make it international.

 

• Conclusion

Never mind which course of action you could take at present – the first step invariably will be to heighten your awareness about the optimal conditions your environment should provide. Only then amendments will be possible.

Next time maybe check the noise levels at your workplace during the day – it doesn’t take more than downloading an app, and could explain a lot of issues – from short attention span to stubborn headaches.

Bring a well-loved object to your desk and explore how that affects your focus and motivation.

Start caring for a plant and see if it thrives.

Why not even monitor your heart rate with a fitness tracker – to spot patterns of troubling locations and time slots?

 

In other words – discover what makes you happy and share it out: @anatomy4architects

The more insights we get from the users – the faster better designs will emerge.

Great space for everyone!