Pages: 6

We, the editors of The Science of People and Office Design, welcome you to our book. We are both psychologists with doctorates and have been active in environmental research and workplace consulting for approximate 75 years combined. We have both previously written books that take psychological research and apply it to architecture and interior design. Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Augustin, 2009) took a broad view of how to apply psychological principles in the design of offices, homes, schools, retail sites, healthcare facilities, and other locations. In contrast, Beyond the Workplace Zoo: Humanising the Office (Oseland, 2022) focusses on office design and how to prevent its degradation due to obsessing over cost but ignoring basic human needs. We wrote our previous books as solo authors but recognised the expertise of our peer group, both workplace researchers and practitioners. In this book, each chapter covers foundational topics related to workplace design, with some chapters focused more on design elements (such as lighting and acoustics) and others on creating spaces that support key-work–related activities (like collaboration and individual focused work). However, the unique aspect of this book is that the perspectives of a recognised researcher and a leading practitioner are presented in each chapter. While their views have different starting points, their findings and recommendations are mostly complementary. However, as might be expected, while individual topics are reviewed in each chapter, recommendations made in different chapters overlap.

Pages: 14

Judith Heerwagen, our environmental psychologist, addresses how biophilic design can significantly influence our physical, emotional, and mental health and performance, as the researcher and designer perspectives that follow make clear. Joye, for example, reports that biophilic design has a noteworthy and beneficial effect on our emotional and cognitive wellbeing. Furthermore, biophilic design elements, such as circadian lighting, can directly influence our health (Africa, Heerwagen, Loftness and Balagtas). William Browning, our practitioner, builds on Kellert’s original elements of biophilic design. They include environmental features such as natural light, natural shapes and forms, natural patterns and aging, spaciousness, links to local physical conditions and cultures, and what Kellert calls “evolved human relationships to nature,” such as providing use-options with prospect and refuge (explained later). Read on to learn much more about the research supporting biophilic design and how to best implement it.

Pages: 22

As the two sections in this chapter make clear, air quality shouldn’t be an afterthought – it has a significant effect on our mental and physical health, wellbeing, and performance. Research documents the important contributions that effectively ventilated spaces can make to organisational (and individual) success. For example, and as an appetiser to the more detailed material to come, MacNaughton and team found that ventilating an office space at double, the ASHRAE minimum rate was likely to add $40 a year per person to building expenses (data were collected in seven different cities in different climate zones in the USA) and to improve occupant performance by 8%, which, for this group of test employees, was equivalent to a $6,500 increase in productivity per employee per year. The researchers also noted lower levels of absenteeism and improved user health in buildings with augmented ventilation levels (compared to ASHRAE minimum). Similarly, Allen et al. learned via data collected over six full days that cognitive performance scores were 61% higher in US office buildings with low volatile organic compounds concentrations (as opposed to high ones) and were particularly enhanced with high outdoor ventilation rates (101% higher than the high VOC condition). The researchers determined that when users experienced the sorts of carbon dioxide levels regularly found in indoor spaces, their cognitive performance was worse than it was at lower concentrations of carbon dioxide.

Pages: 19

The workplace design industry, and its clients and office occupants, spend some time talking about what workplaces look like. Not only are many humans highly attuned to visual stimuli, but the media used to communicate about workplace design are largely visual – we see video walkthroughs of offices online, photographs are posted of existing workplaces, and renderings distributed of potential work sites. People regularly lead their discussions on where they work with narratives setting the visual scene. This chapter focusses on visual aesthetics and the next chapter explores lighting. The topic of colour relates to both chapters and in vision-focused discussions a frequent topic that is highly debated is what colour various surfaces should be. Neuroscience research can help resolve many a rigorous debate about colour, and it will be covered in Chapter 16. This chapter focusses on visual aesthetics in relation to beauty, art, workplace design, etc. and its impact on the wellbeing and performance of occupants, including different personality types.

Pages: 15

Purpose-built workplaces created today for knowledge workers are lit with electric lighting. Many workplaces use as much natural light as they can throughout the day. However, deep floor plans, windowless rooms or blinds-down behaviour means that light switches are often flipped on to supplement natural daylight. Electric lighting has many parameters, such as how bright it is and what colour it is, which can complicate planning and maintaining lighting schemes for workplaces. However, we can partly simplify the planning by bringing it back to its most basic and thinking about our early days as a species when the light bulb was unimaginable. Then, light was dimmer and warmer and lower on the horizon (or literally on the ground in a fire) at the beginning and end of the day and brighter and cooler at noon when the sun was overhead. As mentioned in Chapter 2, we continue to find dawn/dusk-type lighting a relaxing experience; it can also enhance our ability to get along with others and to think creatively. Similarly, when light is brighter and cooler, our ability to concentrate on the task-at-hand, be efficient, etc., gets a positive jolt. The circadian lighting movement is based on these fundamental responses to the light in our world.

Pages: 17

The fact that noise distraction can be due to interaction makes it challenging to create workplaces that reduce the undesirable effects of noise on performance and workplace satisfaction, because effective collaboration is key to any organisation’s success. In addition to adding sound absorption in the workplace (using ceiling tiles, wall panels, and furniture etc.), creating zones for noisier activities away from ones that require quieter conditions is another useful solution. However, success depends on colleague behaviours and how reliably they take noisy activities (like meetings, telephone and online calls) out of earshot of their colleagues or in areas with effective acoustic shielding. Reducing noise distraction in offices, especially dense open-plan ones, is one of the biggest challenges for the workplace design and management community.

Pages: 9

Research and lived experiences consistently indicate that textures, both those seen and those felt against our skin, have a significant effect on our thoughts and behaviours. Even though textures can have such meaningful effects, they are regularly an afterthought, not a focus of workplace-related research or carefully considered during the design process – except ensuring that nothing will irritate the skin or be otherwise annoying. As the material in this chapter indicates, not only do textures have powerful implications for lived experiences, but also their thoughtful selection can elevate both space user performance and wellbeing.

Pages: 17

Creating and maintaining mentally and physically healthy workplaces is the loftiest mission of workplace researchers and designers, one that they often feel is thwarted by businesses’ focus on profit. However, worker health and wellbeing and organisational productivity and success are not mutually exclusive endeavours, as this chapter in this book makes clear. Workplace design that optimises user performance is a design that elevates their wellbeing as well.

Pages: 13

As more cultures mix in a single workplace and as people design for other cultures, understanding what drives members of cultures to professional success, and how they even define “success,” is becoming particularly important. Growing up in our own culture we know its core drivers, how it “works,” either consciously or unconsciously. Nonverbal communication, silent signalling via design elements, is particularly important for sending messages at a culture-wide level, but only members of a particular culture will ever really know what is being “heard” when those missives are transmitted – another reason why research with probable users is important. Design can support cultures, as discussed in the pages that follow, allowing the people living in them to reach their full potential.

Pages: 16

Tailoring a home to support a single user with a single personality profile is easy, but recognising and respecting personality differences in a large corporate workplace is more of a challenge. However, it is made slightly easier because people with similar personalities are attracted to similar jobs, that they do well. That people with similar personalities tend to be successful in particular roles long term does not guarantee that everyone in a particular role will have the same personality profile, but it does make likely that enough do so that a workspace can be designed to support occupants’ most probable personality type. Designing workplaces to support a range of personality types, rather than say just extroverts, is worth the effort. Susan Cain explains that doing so increases the likelihood that people will perform better at work. Different personality types thrive in different environmental conditions, their stress levels, wellbeing are affected as well as their performance.

Pages: 18

People are increasingly knowledgeable about their own neurodiversity and working to attain design-related support at their workplaces so that they can work to their full potential. Empathetic colleagues back these efforts as do organisations seeking to elevate the performance of all employees.

Pages: 18

Many organisations believe that their future success is dependent on effective collaboration. So, there is much focus on designing workspaces to support collaboration but maybe less so on designing workplaces for concentration, as reviewed in the next chapter. Nevertheless, collaborative work also requires bouts of working alone, e.g. meeting preparation and development of shared ideas, so those designing for collaboration cannot ignore the challenges of designing for solo, focused, work.

Pages: 15

Although there tends to be more and more attention paid to fine-tuning workplace design for collaboration, there is still a tremendous amount of focused work that happens there – and there always will be. While some organisations allow working from home as an option, to facilitate focused work without distractions from colleagues, some office workers do not have sufficient privacy or facilities at home and need to come to the office to concentrate.

Pages: 22

Without respite and refreshment, there is a rapid degradation of mood and performance by people at work. When people are mentally tired, they snap at colleagues, do subpar work, have trouble concentrating, and feel stressed. When refreshed, our abilities to get along with each other, to focus, and to process information effectively are restored. When given an opportunity to step away from their work, people can choose to refresh in a number of ways – some more active (like exercising) and others more relaxed (such as drinking a cup of tea). Neuroscience research has shown that regardless of how people choose to revitalise themselves, having specific experiences such as seeing or hearing nature will refresh them at work. Introducing revitalising spaces, and these universally refreshing experiences into the workplace, is therefore paramount for a healthy and productive workforce.

Pages: 17

The creativity of people, working alone or in groups, contributes to the future success of an organisation. Creativity, for the purposes of this chapter, has been defined as developing and using original/imaginative ideas leading to innovation. As the material in the pages that follow indicates, workplace design can facilitate and influence how people think creatively. But, of course, design alone does not enable people to think creatively, especially about topics with which they are not familiar. Over generations, people have been creative in a wide range of spaces. These areas, whether artists’ ateliers or chemistry labs or copywriter’s workrooms, have provided the sort of relaxed but cognitively activated mindset that can support creative ideation. Design can make creative thinking more likely via surface colours, lighting, materials, soundscapes, scent profiles, furnishings, opportunities to influence the environment and architectural features.

Pages: 13

Book objectives The Science of People and Office Design is a call to action for workplace practitioners and researchers, and that most rare creature the researcher-practitioner. As the 14 chapters between the introduction and this conclusion detail, the physical form of offices where people work to their full potential, and live pleasant lives as they do so, has been extensively researched by people in a variety of fields – and in parallel, practitioners with an assortment of areas of expertise have endeavoured to create offices where occupants excel and have positive experiences. As many a colloquialism makes clear, we are always more powerful when collaborating with others who share our goals than working alone, and this book attempts to bridge the knowledge implementation gap between researchers and workplace practitioners all striving, each in their own way, to make work a fulfilling experience for those engaged in it. Interestingly, the researcher and practitioner authors of each chapter presented complementary views. Perhaps, the useful research just does not follow through to implementation, due to the reasons highlighted in Chapter 1 such as cost reduction and design aesthetic. Preaching best practice and science-informed (often referred to as evidence-based) design, from a research and practical perspective, is fundamental for a shift towards workplaces that truly accommodate individual and team needs and facilitate organisational success.