Workplace Environments

Research conducted by Sreedhari Desai and Francesca Gino confirms the importance of the nonverbal cues we find in our physical environment.  They found that “Adults are less likely to cheat and more likely to engage in ‘pro-social’ behaviors when reminders of children, such as teddy bears and crayons, are present.”  When asked to discuss the research, Desai responded that “Child-related cues might unconsciously activate notions of goodness and drive us to get to a pure state and not want to pollute it

Recent research links traveling through doorways and forgetting.  Researchers linked passing through doorways with forgetting thoughts, decisions, and actions.

The British Council for Offices (BCO) polled 1,000 office workers in the United Kingdom to learn more about their workplace experiences.  Researchers determined that “employees greatly valued the social benefits of working in a communal space.  Being able to meet colleagues face to face (79%) and interactions with other employees (79%) were rated the top office perks, above access to technology including files and documents (61%) and better computer hardware and software (35%).”

• Workplace
• Design Preferences
• Increase Productivity/Performance
• Promote Social Behavior/Support Diversity
• Genders
• Workplace Environments
• architecture psychology
• design psychology
• design research
• design science
• environment behavior
• environmental psychology
• interior design psychology
• place advantage
• place science
• sensory science

Costa investigated the tendency of people to sit in the same seat each time they are in a public space.  His research was conducted in academic buildings, but it is applicable in a range of other settings such as workplace conference rooms.  As Costa states, “students choose the same seat over time in university classrooms.

Jahncke and her colleagues explored the performance repercussions of noise in open-plan offices.  Their “Analyses indicate that [study] participants remembered fewer words, rated themselves as more tired, and were less motivated with work in noise compared to low noise.” The noise condition exposed workers to 51 LAeq while the low noise experience was of 39 LAeq.  Wikipedia describes LAeq as the average noise level in a space, measured in dB(A).