Caring About Place
By Peter Block
In one way or
another, we are all trying to make the transition from the industrial
era of predictability and control to the service/information era of
choice and participation. One obstacle is that most of the rooms in
which we come together were designed for the industrial age. It is
almost impossible to find a room in an office building or a hotel that
is suited for dialogue and participation. They are mostly suited for
instruction and persuasion.
--To
begin with, most of the tables are rectangular. If you sit on either
side of a rectangular table, you can not see most of the people on your
side of the table. It's hard to engage people you cannot see. Putting
the tables in a U shape or a square still blinds us to a third or a
fourth of those in the room. Board rooms are the worst. The tables are
fixed and monumental. It clearly was never expected that real
conversation would be required.
--Each
time the room is arranged for people to interact with the speaker rather
than each other, we reinforce passive contact and the values of the
industrial culture. It doesn't matter, then, what is said, the structure
of the room carries its own message.
--In
addition to the furniture, training and meeting rooms are primarily
designed for persuasion and display, either with the speaker in the room
or a speaker in another location. Most of the new money spent to design
meeting space goes into electronics and projection equipment. In a
recent article Training Magazine identified the 10 best conference rooms
in the country. Why are they the best… because they have spent the most
money on electronic technology. In some cases, rooms designed for less
than thirty people have over $250,000 in the walls, floors and ceiling.
With this kind of investment in the walls, you are not about to have the
seats facing each other.
--What
does this say about our beliefs about connecting and communicating? We
will spend a fortune on talking to someone we cannot see, and in the
process arrange the room so that we all face the front and face the
wall. These rooms are artifacts of an industrialized and electronic
culture. We are in love with technology in a way that far exceeds our
interest in connecting with each other. To say that the technology
connects us is a myth. It confuses information exchange with human
interaction. There is nothing wrong with the technology, we just
exaggerate its usefulness.
--In
a broader sense, we are culturally blind about the power of the physical
place. We are willing to meet in rooms without windows, walls without
color or pictures, doors with no moldings. Windows, color, art and
architectural detail bring life and humanity into a setting. If you are
in the business of training, running meetings, convening people, it is
almost impossible to find a room in this country that is designed to
have people really talk to each other.
--The
symbol for participation is a circle. Round tables put each of us in
sight of everyone. Seats in a circle do the same. Even a room full of
round tables has an interactive effect. Don't worry about having some
people with their back to the front. The action is not in the front of
the room, it is at the tables. Eventually we will have whole rooms and
buildings designed to hold the circle. Saturn and Harley Davidson have
understood the importance of the circle in the design of their
buildings.
--Other
organizations are also experimenting with new communal space. The Boeing
Company has "visibility" rooms designed to continually display the
goals, values and progress of large projects. John Warner, a senior
executive at Boeing, started to experiment with the structure of his
visibility room in order to get deeper participation. First he got rid
of the large table and had only chairs with a few, low, coffee tables to
put your stuff on. Then he brought in plants, to add some life to the
environment. They then noticed that the neon lighting was cold and
institutional, so they brought in floor lamps. This, however, was going
too far. It started to feel like a living room. Out came the lamps, but
the chairs, the plants and the intent to design a room for open dialogue
and human encounter remain.
--The
point is not that there is a right design for a room, it is about our
consciousness. As we get more conscious about the impact of how we
physically come together, we will start to redesign our common space.
This will require the joint effort of furniture designers, architects,
hotel executives, organizational real estate people, and those of us who
convene the meetings. A group of us are planning to hold a conference on
the redesign of space and how people are brought together.
This
article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in January 1998
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