Other random but important stuff..

There’s another reason that things all start to look familiar from one space to another that designers and managers know about.  When a space at a company looks like we expect it to look we trust that company more.  This doesn’t mean that every advertising agency’s lobby waiting area has to look the same, but that if we trust an advertising agency, it’s likely that that lobby puts us in the mood we expect it to.

Building designers and managers do think about people with different physical and psychological capabilities when they develop or maintain a space, although it may sometimes seem like they think that everyone who will ever need to stand up after sitting in the chairs they’ve selected is a svelte 20-something with extensive gymnastics training (and who is not wearing a skirt).  You may not have thought a lot about how to make a space comfortable for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but the people at Gallaudet University who developed DeafSpace have.  As a result there are often clear or frosted glass panels in doors, so that people who can’t hear each other coming don’t hit each other with doors; the same goes for hallway intersections—when two long tubes meet at razor harp right angles and people don’t have any acoustic cues that others are near, they slam into each other. When at the point that hallways intersect there’s even a tiny “plaza” crashes fall dramatically.  People who communicate via sign language have to stop sending messages to each other, so auto open doors make their lives much better.  People who are looking at each others’ faces and hands as they walk can miss seeing that they’re approaching a stairwell or something else that they really should be paying attention to, so changing floor textures is a good idea, it lets people traveling know to “look out.”  When people are reading lips, the difficulty factor goes up a lot when a face is backlit so facial features are not visible, when there’s lots of glare, and when it’s hard to pick out facial feature against the wall behind the person being watched because of its color, the pattern of wallpaper on it, or something similar (and lets be honest, most of us do read lips, at least some of the time).  Designers and building managers long ago tumbled onto the fact that design elements that support the differently capable among us can make everyone feel better.

There’s also a science-based reason that building management teams and designer who happen to be around don’t spring into action when you start to complain about sounds, temperatures, etc.  (There may also be many reasons why they do not do so that are not science-based.)  It turns out our perceptions of our physical work environment change based on our mood of the moment, our feelings about the organization we work for, and our explanations for a situation—the more negative our mood, feelings about the organization, and explanations for a situation, the worse our assessments of our physical environments and all of the things that are part of it, what it sounds like in the offices, etc.  So, if the people who actually have to fix whatever problem we bring to light just wait a few minutes the problem noted may very well evaporate.  For example, whether we’re annoyed by people making noise in the offices depends on what we’re up to at the moment we hear the noise, our attitudes toward the people making the noise, if we think that there’s a need for whatever situation is producing the sound, whether all the noise seems useful, whether the noise was predictable and controllable, and finally our mood.

Perhaps the most important thing that designers and managers know about how we experience a space that people who aren’t designers/managers don’t know is that our perceptions of a situation often have a significant effect on how we think about where we are.  For example, if we feel better about the non-physical environment related aspects of our job (workload, how interesting our work is, etc.), our opinions of its physical aspects get a boost up.  The stressors that we experience in our offices also seem more extreme when we’re in a more negative mood; the glare is glare-ier, the noises noisier, etc.