Archive for category: ArtiFacts

Three things are true:

1. Some things are more obvious than others.
2. Some things are more obvious to some people than they are to others.
3. The cyclical nature of everything doesn’t care what’s obvious or to whom.

Case in point: We’ve written about open office spaces before. Their drawbacks were obvious, at least to us. But as is unfailingly true of everything in every cycle, open office spaces had their inevitable turn on the Big Wheel. But if there’s anything more inexorable than the constant revolutions of the Big Wheel, it’s human nature. So, here we are: “The Best Spot in the Office Is a Phone Booth—If You Can Get Into One“:

The sleek enclosures … are popping up in workplaces with open-floor plans. To workers flanked by the constant banter of their colleagues’ business dealings and personal dramas, the booths represent their best hope for any semblance of privacy.

Proper Psychology

Whenever someone refers to the proverbial Three Ps (not counting the two Ps in the subhead above), they’re typically referring to the prevailing wisdom about the prioritized way in which businesses should value their assets. In that context, they’re referring to:

1. People
2. Process
3. Product.

We think those priorities are perfectly appropriate for businesses in industries that make things. But in our industry, in which we create comfortable, functional environments, we only agree with #1. So, our Three Ps are:

1. People. Since people occupy the environments we create, this one was easy.
2. Preferences. The environments in which we live and work should be flexibly accommodating enough to afford people the things they prefer, including privacy.
3. Prerogative. You might have expected us to have made this one privacy. We could have. But we think privacy should be people’s prerogative, based on their preferences.

“You can’t crank out something with good grammar when the person behind you is slurping their soup.”

Don’t Jump

According to the old saying, what goes around comes around. Since that’s true, maybe we can make each turn of the Big Wheel a little smoother and a little less jarring (to say nothing of expensive) if we temper the jerking of the collective knee with a little forethought, a little moderation, and a little patience. The only way to distinguish what seems to be a good idea from what turns out to be a bad one is to take the time to tell the difference.

Open office spaces seemed like a good idea at one turning of the Big Wheel. They saved companies money by accommodating more people in less space and by reducing the expenses of walls and doors. But they kept the people who worked in them from fulfilling their human need for privacy. And what now feels like grinding dissonance (“Hey, wait! We thought …!”) is another creaking turn of the Big Wheel in response to reality, human nature, and the time we could have taken before jumping at the idea.

Let’s slow down. Sometimes the best way to get ahead is to go back to the future.

Let’s face it, business is business. And we’re all looking to get our fair share. But when it comes to real estate, we may not be getting it. I’m not sure if this is due to people’s lack of imagination or if it’s because some people just aren’t visual thinkers. But it seems pretty common that if a space isn’t perfect as is, it gets a thumbs down.

Whether it’s commercial or residential, I love architecture. And I love to see people enjoy what the architecture in their properties can give to them. But even if I put my architectural euphoria aside and focus on the business aspect of real estate, rather than its aesthetics, the as-is-is-no-good mentality still puzzles me.

Follow the Money

I recently tracked three condos that were on the market in the same complex. One listed for $349,900 and attracted an offer in less than a week. A second one listed for $339,000, hung around for a couple of weeks, and sold for $337,000.

The third one is still on the market. After starting at $337,000, it recently took another price reduction. It’s now down to $314,000 and is still sitting. All three units had relatively the same square footage. And the one that’s still sitting even has a finished basement.

Why is the third one still sitting? Presentation (or the lack thereof).

Foresight, not Hindsight

This first condo was clean. Detailed in every way, it left little to the imagination. Boom! Sold. The second one had been empty. It took a little time and sold for $2,000 below the asking price. The third one … well … it wasn’t staged. It wasn’t clean. Little thought or effort was put into its presentation. So, the seller will take a loss, and the realtor will earn less commission. Call me biased. Call me self-serving. But that makes no (dollars and) sense.

Instead of spending $500 to $2,000 on styling advice and staging costs, someone will take a bath to the tune of $23,000 and counting. That never has to happen.

Real estate is an investment. A properly staged piece of real estate is an asset. Both can be maximized with a little time, a little care, a few dollars (you’ll more than get back on the sale), and a little style.

Happy seller. Happy realtor. Happy buyer. That’s the ideal trifecta.

If you can’t imagine that perspectives, tastes, and styles can make significant differences in staging a space — in evoking a particular mood, in reflecting a personality, in conveying a vision or a perspective — I conducted a visual experiment to share with you: I took the same four apples and the same two pieces of cheese and arranged them in different ways with different elements. Here’s what happened.

Setting One

In this version, I staged the apples and cheese as part of a simple coffee service. The setting is relatively informal. One coffee pot. One plant. Two cups. Some autumn leaves. The image suggests seasonal comfort, cordiality, and collegial warmth. It implies the desire of the space to create a setting of ease, openness, and sharing. And it manifests the intention to be inviting and hospitable.

Setting Two

In contrast to Setting One, this setting evokes a slightly higher degree of formality. The wine bottle and the accompanying glasses hint at friendliness, perhaps even romance. The cutting board, which replaces the plate from Setting One, connotes hospitality and the serving of a guest. The reflections in the mirrored surface complement the bottle and the wine glasses while adding the dimension of depth.

Setting Three

This setting creates an air of Asian rusticity. The unfinished wood, the copper accents on the board in front, and the ceramic pot with the copper-wire accent combine to suggest a kind of Eastern mystique. The overall effect is one of inviting intrigue, a hint of uncommon ornamentalism, and subtle touches of engagingly unorthodox, unpretentious flair.

It’s All in the Presentation

Same apples. Same cheese. Different results. Regardless of what your elements are, new or adaptably re-used, their presentation is the key to creating the environment you desire.

Before you decide to do, design, or discard anything, talk to us. The conversation won’t cost you anything. The results may save you more than you imagined they could.

There’s no such thing as bad information. I try to take in as much as I can. I try to consider all I take in. I don’t agree with all I take in. And I try to be accepting of and informed by all I take in. But I do have lines, and sometimes I have to draw them. Case in point: this essay on CityLab: “The Case for Rooms: It’s time to end the tyranny of open-concept interior design“.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. I fully respect the author’s training and her right to her opinion. I fully appreciate the history of architectural trends she presents and the reasons for them, from socio-economic realities to the availability and popularity of materials and the evolution of delivery methods. And I grant the correctness of the heating and acoustical challenges she attributes to open-concept designs. But tyranny? Really? As a term used for the purpose of expressing an opinion of a design trend, that’s a little over the top — to say nothing of politically charged.

Red Flags

Perhaps because the author’s use of tyranny heightened my sensitivity to her having some kind of agenda or axe to grind, I became wary of the logic (or lack thereof) of her ostensible argument. As a result, when she described the rising popularity of the bungalow and the Foursquare between 1900 and 1910s, this jumped out at me:

Working-class homes now had three to five rooms; middle-class homes, six to eight.

That’s a very peculiar piece of reasoning right there. Without any reference to the respective square footages of working-class or middle-class homes, that reasoning (or lack thereof) is the rough equivalent of the old joke about the call to the pizza joint:

Caller: I’d like to order a pizza to go.
Pizza Joint: Would you like that cut in six slices or eight?
Caller: You’d better cut it in six. I don’t think I can eat eight.

We can only imagine the author’s disdain had any of those working-class or middle-class homeowners opted to have fewer rooms in exchange for open-concept designs.

The Lost Art

The would-be design experts are entitled to their opinions. But so are the people for whom they design. If people felt tyrannized by open-concept designs, would they still be popular? No. Will open-concept designs ultimately go the way of the dodo bird, harvest gold appliances, and popcorn ceilings? Who knows? That’s precisely the point.

We have no more business telling the people for whom we practice our art that open-concept designs are tyrannical than we do telling them they’re no longer allowed to have tufted headboards, lace doilies, or fake fruit. That’s why, as I suggested in an earlier post, our work can’t be driven by trends espoused on social media or promoted on the Internet.

Rather, we need to reclaim the lost art of perspective. A little common sense, a little open-mindedness, a little acceptance will go a long way toward helping us keep our perspectives — and helping our customers keep their satisfaction.

Let’s step away from the agendas. We can be better than that.

We’ve already written about the fact that the open office concept is dead. This article from Inc. — “It’s Official: Open Plan Offices Are Now the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time” — is just another stake through its heart. But some things die harder than others. That’s why we have Dracula and zombies. It’s why Freddie Kruger, Jason Voorhees, and their respective movie franchises can never be put to rest. And it’s why we seem determined to perpetuate force-fed collaboration unto self-defeat.

Case in point: “You Could Be Too Much of a Team Player“, published in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), says this, in part:

The splintering of demands that marks a collaborative workplace … can also hurt your organization … Many white-collar employees who in the past would have worked side-by-side with a few colleagues now spend 85% of their time collaborating with multiple teams of co-workers … The volume and diversity of collaborative demands on employees have risen 50% in the past decade.

As the WSJ article makes clear, the open office design isn’t the only culprit when it comes to defeating teams and teamwork and to depriving people of privacy and the ability to concentrate. And while setting personal boundaries when it comes to things like meetings, conference calls, email traffic, instant messaging, and other impromptu interruptions is essential, design can be the key to restoring comfort, productivity, and sanity to the workplace.

Purposeful Control

Some aspects of stress and distraction can’t be controlled. Some stresses and distractions come with particular kinds of jobs. Some of them are matters of individual temperament. But others can be managed by designing particular elements into the workspace. Those elements can include but will definitely not be limited to:

• Inviting, comfortable meeting rooms.
• Quiet, comfortable private offices.
• Engaging, comfortable shared spaces for breaks, collaborative work, and other users.

It’s hard to imagine much could go wrong if we design workspaces for the people who have to spend a third of their lives  in them.

Practicality by Design

We’re not quite convinced it’s possible to be too much of a team player. But this excerpt from the book, Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, suggests we might have been a bit too hasty in adopting open offices and a bit too forgetful in the bargain:

At Yale in 1958 individuals competed with brainstorming groups to solve the same problem. The individuals dominated. They generated more solutions, and their solutions were independently judged to be higher quality and more original … And yet … over a half century later, teams are still running group brainstorms.

Maybe the best thing we can do is to think of the people who work in the spaces we design as being more intelligent than zombies, more creative than interchangeable automatons. If we do, we’ll give them the space they need to work in teams and the privacy they need to work alone. And those people will likely be more satisfied and more productive.

At the very least, they won’t feel like they’re in a bad horror movie, even if it is a classic.