Transitioning from a traditional office to an open office environment that fosters collaboration and mobility can be challenging. The Internet contains articles about organizations opening up innovative, colorful spaces with touchdown stations, huddle rooms, phone booths, and amenities such as coffee bars, office slides, and ping-pong tables.
But I am often curious whether these offices provide a real connection to the employees versus a trendy design fad intended to make the workplaces seem cool. It is precisely this deeper connection that design psychology can provide when creating new workplaces.
Can design psychology help create spaces for your new office that give employees a sense of purpose and meaning?
What Is Design Psychology?
The founder of design psychology, Toby Israel, Ph.D., uses her training in environmental psychology to help people make a greater connection to space. She defines design psychology as the “practice of architecture, planning and interior design in which psychology is the principal design tool.” In her book, Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, she outlines techniques that help us connect deeper to space.
Such methods enable us to take a “deep dive” into our past to discover positive associations with space. Building upon this understanding empowers us to define future spaces that have a meaningful connection to us as individuals. Such a connection is transformative because it helps us design purposeful, interconnected spaces that enhance our lives.
Some Design Psychology Tools
With numerous internet articles displaying happy millennials working in bright and attractive open office spaces, it can be easy to overlook that the transition to such space is a change management process that must start with employee buy-in from the earliest stages of the design effort.
Employee participation in the space programming and conceptual design effort is essential to design a space that is attractive and meets the functional needs of the work performed in the office. Such participation is also necessary to ensure that the space holds a deeper meaning for the employees and is connected to the organization's values.
Here are a few guidelines gleaned from design psychology that could assist in establishing such meaning.
1. Spaces in Our Past
We all have associations with spaces where we have lived or worked in the past. Our experiences in these spaces shape the meaning of spaces in our present.
One of the tools used in design psychology is constructing a timeline of past spaces. On this timeline, employees can list their previous locations and their positive and negative associations with each workplace. Evaluating and comparing the resulting associations across all employees can reveal incredible insight.
It is tempting to think that all employees like open spaces, natural daylight, and informal work areas. However, this may only be the case for some. Identifying the positive collective associations with space across a workforce is essential, ultimately producing better space planning and design results.
2. Spaces in Our Future
Visioning is an exercise that helps employees visualize an ideal workplace for the future. The visioning exercise prompts employees to meditate and create a future space where their positive associations align to imagine a welcoming and productive space.
This exercise goes much deeper than imagining a future workstation near a window. Visioning gets at a more profound connection by asking participants to walk through the space in their mind, imagine 360° views with ideal adjacencies, and interact with others.
Recording and analyzing these visions allows space planners and designers to learn what employees view as ideal and how they would prefer to interact in that space.
3. Temperament Types
Temperament types are used to classify people by personality traits that indicate preferences for processing information, communicating, and contributing in the workplace. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a well-known temperament identification test, though many other methods exist.
One of the fundamental traits in Myers-Briggs is to identify whether someone is introverted or extroverted. In general, introverts tend to be quieter, prefer smaller groups, are private, and think about what they will say before they speak. Conversely, extroverts are talkative, enjoy interaction with others, like group settings, and are expressive. This oversimplifies introverts and extroverts, as very few people are all one or the other. However, introverts and extroverts have different preferences in the workplace (an upcoming blog by Alison Jones will examine this topic in more detail).
An exercise in design psychology is to identify the temperament types of employees to inform the space planning and design process as to the mix of spaces that would benefit the workforce. All employees can benefit from having spaces for focused work, collaboration, and informal spaces that offer a more relaxed setting. However, the temperament types of the employees can assist in determining the appropriate mix of these spaces for your workforce. (This is one of many factors determining the appropriate mix of spaces, as the type of work performed will also heavily influence space needs.)
Having an introvert versus extrovert tendency is only one aspect of the temperament types that can influence space. For example, design psychology temperament type exercises can also draw out the employees who would thrive better in a defined and organized workplace versus an informal and more social setting. Some temperament types are attracted to brainstorming activities and could benefit from whiteboard collaboration rooms. Other temperament types will want the interaction of moving around the office versus staying in a fixed location.
Giving Meaning to Your New Office
The guidelines described above represent only a small portion of the tools used by design psychologists to assist in designing meaningful spaces. The transition to an open office space that promotes collaboration and mobility represents a significant transformation for employees in space and work functions.
The use of the techniques described in this article, augmented by some of the other design psychology tools, is an ideal way to help your employees feel connected to a meaningful space which, in turn, will undoubtedly enhance their happiness and productivity.
