Why the human-centric workplace is not just fast fashion

On our minds

Think back to when the world’s biggest companies were only as good as their manufacturing prowess. A hundred years ago, when making a widget cheaper than the other guy was what would put you on top, you’d do well to build your factory around what worked best for widgets. If that meant making some design choices that weren’t so good for people, who cared? Your widgets, not your people, were making your money.

Now, in the information age, a company’s people are the source of its value. That means work environments need to work for humans: they must physically and psychologically support us, not machines.

We can’t achieve this design sea change simply by dressing up our cubicles with pictures of our dog, however. We can’t achieve it by ordering the same factory-scale, extruded aluminum office furniture that’s been around since the 1950s—but in new colors this time!—and calling it different.

We can achieve it by introducing diverse sensory experiences to the office that awaken our faculties and remind us of our human nature. We can achieve it by incorporating residential influences that offer human-scale comfort. We can achieve it by trading our white-topped trading desk for a wood-topped meeting table, and enabling employees to make their own decisions.

What all these workplace innovations have in common, from a cognitive psychology perspective, is that they address the human facility for visual touch: when we see something, we automatically imagine what it would feel like to touch it. When a sensory experience is rich enough to engage more than one of our senses, it serves to stimulate our imaginations and boost our creativity—reactions that greatly serve both today’s keen knowledge workers and the dynamic companies who rely on their ingenuity.

As humans rise to the top of the workplace food chain, we can see concurrent evidence in other built environments of our innate desire to share and esteem the things we create. The popularity of wrought iron stair railings, which we can clearly envision a welder twisting; historic buildings made from hand-sized bricks, not machine-sized cinder blocks; rough-hewn structural beams that show the carpenter’s touch—all forgo the harsh perfectionism of the modern industrial world and elevate us to a romantic place, to somewhere that feels emotional, personal, natural. (We at PLASTARC think this largely explains the proliferation of the titillatingly titled phenomenon of ruin porn.)

Let’s make the most of this new opportunity to design workplaces for people—not machines—by celebrating what makes us human in our offices every day. Human-centric design is not another fashion trend: it’s our chance to make workplaces work for the people who power our world.

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