“There’s no place like the office, there’s no place like the office…” said no one ever—at least not yet. If Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz were pining for a sense of home today, she might stand a chance of finding it in the contemporary workplace.
“Resimercial” design, which has become increasingly popular in recent years, aims to combine the comforts of our residences with the production requirements of commercial products. While we can’t expect that our offices will ever feel quite like home, we can do our best to make them more comfortable, a key component of both happiness and health.
Generally, individuals spend proportionally more of their money outfitting their residential spaces than companies do on their workspaces. The money we spend on our houses and apartments is one way we invest in our relationship with those spaces. The more we customize, the more we feel in control—and the more we feel in control, the more we feel like investing our time and energy. The same thing can happen at work, and increasingly it is.
Many current workplaces maintain mid to late 20th century standards with a focus on machine lead productivity rather than serving the emergent knowledge economy where human brain-power and creativity drive the work. In 2018, we’re well into the human-centric, “people power” era of the information age, workplace designers and business owners are keen to ensure that employees and visitors connect with their workspaces. Now more than ever people are the source of companies’ value, so work environments need to work for humans; they must physically and psychologically support us.
Employee recruitment, retention, productivity, and happiness can increase at companies that emphasize human-centric design. These elements foster personal engagement with the spaces, similar to what happens when people personally curate the details that make their homes unique. (You can read more about this concept in the white paper we authored with our client west elm WORKSPACE.)