To appreciate its power, think of design as a drug
The search for some concoction or contraption to improve our performance at work is nothing new. Lawyers, bankers and other professionals have performance-enhancing drugs to gain a competitive advantage.
But the design of a workspace can actually have similar effects on those who create it, consume it or pursue it. And, just like a drug, design can have good and bad effects.
Instead of chemicals, design manipulates space to change behaviour. , for example, can encourage people who did not know one another to interact more.
have looked into the association between office design and performance. These aim to understand attributes of the physical environment that can improve cognitive performance in a similar way to how scientists study substances .
It seems that small open-plan offices support people better than large ones in conducting cognitively demanding tasks.
Just as – notably dependence, insomnia, nervousness and anorexia – so too does design, albeit different ones.
, which provides people with a choice of settings for various workplace activities, found that, while it may improve interaction and communication within a team, this comes at the potential cost of concentration and privacy.
Aligning beliefs, expectations and workspace
There is, however, a very specific and equally important aspect that designing a drug and designing a workplace have in common – .
A person's existing beliefs prompt a response that is in line with their expectations. Inert blue pills are in patients. This is solely due to the expectations raised by the colour of the capsule.
There is a showing how strong this response is.
, for instance, are defined as chemically inactive. But in practice they are – pills come with a whole bunch of that has an effect.
The opposite of the placebo effect is the nocebo effect – expectation of a negative outcome . A doctor simply describing what might happen to a patient without this information.
Branded placebos than unbranded ones.
This invites the question: can the brand of a designer impact the performance of a workplace beyond the attributes of the design? We don't yet know the clinical answer to this question.
The placebo effect . But can people's creativity be similar manipulated? We don't yet know, but this is the subject of my ongoing research into the expectancy hypothesis and workplace design.
We are asking groups to complete a . While the groups will do the test in the same room, one group will be primed with a sign saying the "innovation lab". Others will be negatively primed with a sign such as "storeroom". The placebo will just be in a meeting room.
Big Pharma, Big Design, Big Data … and the big gap
This is an area we are just starting to explore, as we collect a – people's social interactions (e.g. speaking rates in conversation and size of social groups), daily activities (e.g. physical activity and sleep), sense of , and mobility patterns (e.g. frequency and duration of time spent at various locations), to name a few.
These, however, don't account for the nocebo or placebo effect. As we develop new ways of collecting data, we should improve the way we analyse it.
What is more, have found that as the rituals imbued in the treatment of ailments are stripped back, so too is the meaning for the patient. This, in turn, diminishes the process and decreases the treatment's ability to heal.
This notion can be extrapolated to organisations. The way we design the workspace follows how the organisation itself is designed. Measuring the placebo and nocebo effect in design has the potential to further our understanding of the properties of space. And in doing so, we should be able to prescribe better treatments for organisations to work smarter.
Provided by The Conversation
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