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When it comes to space and occupancy management, an accurate floor plan can do more than just represent the physical space—it can help an organization secure occupants’ safety and prepare for the unexpected.
Adobe campus, San Jose, Calif. Image © Emily Hagopian.
Discovering the unexpected is typically a joy in research—as well as one of the reasons to conduct research in the first place. But the discovery of unexpected insights can also be puzzling, as it forces researchers to confront surprising circumstances and theorize explanations for findings they never anticipated.
Image © Gensler.
Design is different today because the world is changing faster than ever, making design research the key to delivering innovative, experience enhancing projects.
Capital One West Creek. Image © Halkin Mason.
The function and purpose of the physical corporate workspace is evolving. Technology has made ‘where’ we work irrelevant in many cases. The workplace of the future is more about ‘how’ we work, bringing people together to collaborate, innovate, learn and socialize. It’s about communicating, nurturing and supporting a company’s culture and mission. Couple that institutional evolution with an increase in worker expectations, their desire to contribute and engage in a meaningful enterprise and the emerging generational appetite for advancement through more frequent changes and you’ll quickly realize that the business of design is no longer ‘business as usual.’ To compete with top talent, Financial Services Firms must place a greater emphasis on the employee experience.
A demo of UC San Diego’s StarCAVE—a five-sided virtual reality room. Image courtesy of Flikr user Glenn Ricart.
Looking to Neuroscience for Solutions
With an ever-growing amount of data from various sources of research, the field of architecture is changing in response to a greater demand for solutions that will have meaningful effects on its occupants. Recently, there have been efforts to incorporate insights from the social sciences, such as behavioral and cognitive psychology, in order to better understand the impact that design has on the occupants’ actions, thoughts and feelings. It should come as no surprise then that designers recognize the potential of neuroscience to uncover how our brains perceive our surrounding environment and then elicit certain cognitive and physiological responses.
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Christi Van Maanen