How your office design is making you dumber.

INSIGHT

Flattening our world kills our movement intelligence and creates dumb bodies.

It makes total sense — we have designed our world for comfort and safety. Why wouldn’t we? As a highly intelligent, collaborative and creative species, we followed what the brain was designed for: minimizing all risk and surprises so that we could relax and hoard our resources. Where this makes a lot of cognitive and social sense, it makes absolutely no physical sense, especially in an overpopulated modern world. By flattening our environments in order to provide the easiest way to get around, we have numbed and dumbed down our human ability to sense danger, premeditate risk and navigate uncertainty with our heightened sense-ability as a part of daily life. Handrails and anti-slip surfaces used to be for those whom might need the extra help — they are now standardized safety features in most buildings for everyone. We control climates, smooth surfaces for optimal shoe tracking and create some of the most aesthetically stunning environments to lure us to spend the majority of our time inside. Architectural innovations are embracing the “senso-responsive” approach that looks at “spatial, assistive consciousness” that is seamlessly integrated into one’s environment to help orchestrate human-activity with ambient needs (like lighting, temperature, mood, data integration, spacial access, and augmented reality) to break down time, understanding and intention of humans so that it can respond to behavior over time. WeWork’s modularity design is based off this senso-reponsive data in order to embrace modularity and improvements from one office to the next, based on human activity as opposed to just design function and aesthetics. However, we must wonder whether flattening our surfaces for comfort, safety AND now sense-making is robbing us of a mind-body competency that was designed to run through jungles away from predators. Though I’m not advocating for Tarzan-friendly work environments, I do believe there is room to design for senso-supportive spaces: places where we don’t need to switch off our bodies and only rely on our minds and AI butlers to do the work our proprioceptors and sensor-receptors were designed to do to maximize our whole intelligence.

INSPIRATION

The WELL Building Standard

The WELL Building Standard is revolutionizing the way people think about buildings. Going beyond sustainability principles and green building materials, it explores how we design operations and behaviors within places where we live, work, learn and play to optimize our well-being. Based on 7 elements regarded to dictate our ability to thrive in a space, the standard offers guidelines for how we should approach built environments when being outside is not an option.

WELL v2 is founded on the following principles:

Equitable: Provides the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people, inclusive of all demographic and economic groups and with special consideration of groups of the least advantage or vulnerable populations.

Global: Proposes interventions that are feasible, achievable and relevant across many applications throughout the world.

Evidence-based: Undergirded by strong, validated research yielding conclusions that can reasonably be expected to receive acceptance by the scientific community.

Technically robust: Draws upon industry best practices and proven strategies, offering consistency in findings across the relevant field or discipline.

Customer-focused: Defines program requirements through a dynamic process, with multiple opportunities for stakeholder engagement, and by tapping the expertise of established leaders in science, medicine, business, design and operations.

Resilient: Responds to advances in scientific knowledge and technology, continuously adapting and integrating new findings in the field.

www.wellcertified.com

INNOVATION

“Sensoffice”

A set of office-space design principles that helps architects and designers create smart “whole human” considerations in office design that take into account not only biophilia and cradle-to-cradle materials, but also human sensory and proprioceptive intelligence.

• The best of senso-receptive and senso-supportive ideas that help bodies thrive in an environment without creating crutches or liabilities for safety. The aim is to optimize our biological sense mechanisms (our bodies are our brains) to keep us smart, agile, alert, mindful and connected to our environments using tactile feedback surfaces and maneuverable structures that require us to move more in an office than we currently do.

• There’s an intermediary spot between living in a flattened world of safety vs. going out in nature and hiking unpredictable terrain: and the sensor-supportive office principles helps designers strike a balance with the place people spend most of their hours during the week: the office.

• Advocating the need to design for: uneven surfaces, tactile feedback, biphony, nature lighting, smart obstacles and biophilic elements, the Senso-Supportive principles breakdown why our biology does better with these things designed into our environments because they’ve been a part of our human evolutionary environment for millenia.