By Rob HarrisIssue 11 – Spring 2019 pages 40 – 44
Tags: design • research • workplace

Note:
The Work&Place Editorial Advisory Board has awarded this article the 2019 Outstanding Insight gold medal as the best article submitted this year. We recommend it highly for its candor, its thoughtful critique of workplace research, and its call for new kinds of innovative thinking in workplace design.

I spent some time with Frank Duffy recently, releasing a stream of memories of working with him, first as an employee at DEGW during the 1980s, and then as a client while directing developer Stanhope’s research programme during the 1990s. Along with his long-term business partner, John Worthington, and thinkers including Franklin Becker, Gerald Davis, Michael Joroff and Jack Tanis, to name a few, Frank helped sketch out the grand scheme of what we now call ‘workplace’. Much of the work of their successors has involved filling in the matrix of detail within the grand scheme.
But further reflection has caused me to ask whether, in filling in the finer details, we have recently somehow lost our way. Are we, the ‘workplace profession’, instead of standing on giants’ shoulders, now just pandering to fads and fancies? Or, even more radical, might it be that ‘workplace’ is now done, and that we’ve run out of meaningful things to say?
Back to the beginning …
I ask these questions because much workplace ‘research’ that I have read in recent years (say, the past five) is not research in the commonly-accepted sense of the term. Rather, much of it is agenda-driven, serving the purposes of narrowly-defined interest groups. Some of it is simply opinion gathering, in the tradition of “eight out of ten cat owners said ….”, with little attention given to social science rigour. Some of it is so devoid of context that it simply crumbles to dust when methodologies are exposed to scrutiny.
Duffy began to publish back in the 1970s and, for my money, one of his earliest articles counts among his most incisive and instructive. The figure below (by today’s MS Office standards, a somewhat primitive diagram) appeared in a 1974 article, arguing that different organisational characteristics demand various kinds of office layouts.[i]

Linking Office Layouts to Organisational Types (Source: Duffy, 1974)
The fact is that an organisation and an individual will have different perspectives on what is a ‘good’ workplace. The design imperative is to provide settings which accommodate a balance between the corporate and individual perspectives. Duffy was one of the earliest to link organisational ecology with physical form.
A decade after Duffy’s article two Harvard academics, Philip Stone and Robert Luchetti, released a landmark article in which they sought to:
… challenge the customary ways of thinking about offices and show how managers can gain the advantages and avoid the disadvantages of the new technologies. Managers can integrate physical layout, design, and communications to support organizational objectives that:

Emphasize informal exchange.
Reassign people to different work teams and study groups.
Provide many employees access to specialized equipment….