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Chiat Day

I have been reading on the old Chiat Day offices, excerpts are from Wired:  

“You will have private space,” declared Chiat, “it just won’t be personal space.

What Chiat did was set up, in effect, a college campus. “That was my model,” he says. “The idea is, you go to lectures, gather information, but you do your work wherever you like.” To encourage this free-flow, Chiat replaced private offices and cubicles with little clusters of couches and tabletops grouped into common areas, along with a Student Union-like central gathering place and several large conference rooms. He even installed little “Tilt-A-Whirl” domed cars, taken from old amusement park rides, where two people could sit down together and brainstorm – assuming they didn’t mind looking ridiculous as they did it.

He also did a test run. One of the first guinea pigs was Monika Miller, an associate media director. One day, Miller’s desk was taken away from her. To cope, she brought in a little red wagon, a classic Radio Flyer model. Each day, Miller would pile all of her documents, files, and possessions into her wagon, and begin to drag it up and down the halls, looking for the empty desk of someone out sick for the day. “Everyone thought it was so cute,” recalls Miller. “I’d be trudging down the hall, and they’d laugh and say, ‘Oh look, here she comes with that little red wagon.’ It was like a bad dream.”

Before long, there was a beeline for the only vestiges of a conventional workplace – the enclosed “project rooms.” In LA and, later, in the New York virtual office, these rooms had been designated for clients, or agency groups working for a particular client. But in the frantic attempts to escape from open space, nobody much cared who they were designated for. “The rooms would quickly fill up with people,” says freelance copywriter Paul Spencer, “and then they’d say to everyone else, ‘Get out – this is mine!'”

Chiat had anticipated this pathetic human reaction, and was ready. He declared that “nesting” – parking in any one place for more than a day – was strictly forbidden. In the “Chiat High” he’d created, he acted as both principal and hall monitor. Says Rabosky: “Jay would walk around, and he’d give you this look and say, ‘Did you sit here yesterday?’ And he’d make you get up and move.” 

Jay Chiat left the scene of the chaos and turned his attention to New York. Here, he would unveil his virtual experiment’s real showpiece. Designed by the Italian architect Gaetano Pesce …”A surgeon who comes with a red shirt and green shoes is not necessarily a clown,” he explains.

Pesce had also designed “playful” chairs with springs at the feet; they wobbled, and sank too low, making the traffic girls’ miniskirts ride up. The conference room table was coated in a soft silicone resin that had a magnetic effect on paper. “It was hilarious to watch someone in the middle of an important presentation desperately trying to pick up a piece of paper off that desk,” recalls one sadistic staffer.

The media kept gushing about Chiat’s virtual adventure, but by the end of year one, the whole “grand experiment” was already wobblier than a Gaetano Pesce chair.

Office fungi

I was actually looking into bacteria and office fungi when I stumbled across this: It seems that the largest individual lives in the US, in Michigan Forest to be precise and is a clonal fungus of over 120,000 square meters.

To go back to the office fungi:” …. office buildings provide an exceptionally favorable environment of high hudity and standing water in circulation and air-conditioning ducts, ceiling tiles, insulation and even ice machines. These microorganisms release bioaerosols, which include tiny spores from molds and other fungi that float through the air and irritate skin and mucous membranes.”

more here

and did you know that your keyboard might have 60 times more bacteria and germs than your toilet seat?

“Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, counted bacteria on different surfaces found in offices and homes. The study was funded by The Clorox Co., which sells household disinfectants.

Gerba found that office toilet seats had an average of 49 germs per square inch. Germ counts on computer keyboards were more than 60 times higher, averaging 3,295 bacteria per square inch. Even worse were the tops of desks (21,000) and telephones (25,000).

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Toilet seats get frequent cleaning with strong disinfectants that kill germs. Keyboards and mice may never get sanitized.”

So start cleaning that keyboard now…

 

Values and meaning

Been reading this interview with Nathan Shedroff at core 77 on his new book Design is the Problem. Very interesting thoughts at the end of the interview:

“Shedroff: At the risk of starting an entirely new conversation, I’ll say that Meaning is the most significant and powerful element of whatever people create for others. Just like how our faces show emotion universally, core meanings are universal throughout all of humanity. This means that every person, in every culture, knows what these core meanings are and why they are significant. Of course, we all prioritize and express meanings differently, which is how they form our values and how they tie into our emotions. Meanings, values, and emotions sit at a deeper level in our lives than price and performance. So, they’re more powerful (which is why they can be so motivating and effective when triggered correctly) but they’re much more difficult to detect, understand, and design for. However, as humans, we do this everyday, just more intuitively or accidentally than deliberately.

For most people, the word “sustainability” doesn’t connect with much in their lives””it doesn’t trigger many emotions, values, or meanings. Of course, there are minorities for whom it does””strongly, both positively and negatively. This being the case, we must understand our customers at these deeper levels (and smart ethnographic and other qualitative methods are the approach to doing this successfully), in order to connect with their values and meanings through more sustainable solutions. For some, the best connections are health and safety (rather than tout how sustainable something is, talking about how it’s better for people or promotes a safer home or nation, is often more successful). This is particularly true for parents of babies and young children, who often spend a lot of time and money on products, services, and food that they wouldn’t use otherwise because of they’re perceived health benefits. For example, parents routinely, now, purchase organic baby food when they don’t regularly eat organic foods themselves. For others, the triggers might be around efficiency and money-saving. For still others, it might be around the enjoyment of certain activities, like hunting and fishing (which aren’t, typically, connected to environmentalism yet are already endangered activities by overfishing and overhunting as well as overtaxing ecosystems).

Connecting to people’s values and meanings is going to be critical in order to change behaviors and choices and reach more sustainable goals. There’s nothing inherently off-putting about sustainability at all. I challenge you to find someone who is in favor of purposely ruining the future. The problem is in helping people become aware of their impacts and connecting their perfectly adequate values to the effects their activities have. Most of the issues and imperatives around sustainability are simply invisible to people and if we can make them visible, in their languages, we can get more people on board. It’s more than merely design but design thinking and processes can contribute tremendously to making this happen quickly.”