1. The Kelly commentary
CORPORATE REAL ESTATE ISSUES AND IDEAS Nov 2014
GIVE ME SOME SPACE!
Intimate (0-18”), Personal (18-48”),
Social (4-9’) and Public (>9’) space
required by individuals. While the
sizes of the areas change from culture
to culture, within a culture, they are
always present and always similarly
sized.
Today’s open plan layouts, termed the
‘Montessori approach’ by theWSJ for
its use of long tables with staff on either
side, flies in the face of what is clinically
shown as a set of inviolable boundaries
necessary for peak performance.
Minimal separations between occupants
invade both personal and intimate space
needs. Our natural fight or flight
mechanism makes us hyper-vigilant and
interferes with concentration and
creating underlying tension in the
workplace.
Productivity is a notoriously difficult
concept to measure, yet we all know
when we feel we have enough personal
room for an activity at hand. Today’s
open plans are classic illustrations of how
to foment dissatisfaction and increase
distraction, negatively affecting worker
and work alike in pursuit of short term
objectives.
For more on this documented spatial
reality, follow the link below and think
about the space you’re occupying when
performing various daily tasks. How
might your performance change just by
the simple act of having others sit closer
to you or further away?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxemics
The late sixties were a period of great
anthropological investigation. There
was Jane Goodall and her ground-breaking
work with apes, Jane Jacobs
and her work on neighborhoods and
there was Edward Hall, the subject of
this month’s Commentary.
Your columnist was fortunate to study
under Hall, the noted social
anthropologist, hearing his findings
firsthand on territoriality and the
functioning of modern man.
All mammals have spatial envelopes
that must be respected for an
individual’s and group’s health. The
collective term for this phenomena is
proxemics, a field pioneered by Hall.
Investigated duringWWII and through
analyses of contemporary workers, Hall
has found that there are a remarkable
set of interlocking spaces defining
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