Sitting across the table

The implications of our space arrangements.

Hey friends, welcome back. A while back, we touched on the work of Edward Hall as we thought about Space as Culture. You can view that article here:

Space as Culture

In this article, we landed on the notion that “our spaces shape—or provide the ruts for—the type of people we can become, even as we have made those ruts, to begin with.”

Today, I want to take us back to this line of thinking, but instead of zooming out and focusing on the enormous picture implications of space on culture, I want to think a bit about the implications of our day-to-day areas on us as people. No, this isn’t about to become a newsletter about interior design, but the way we layout our spaces do have much more impact than we likely realize.

Let’s take Peter Block’s exploration of spaces and their design:

Conference rooms have long rectangular tables basically designed for negotiation, one side facing the other. The effect is that you can only see those on “the other side.” You sit blind to those on your own side…

The ends of the table are VIP position. We all know this and avoid those seats…

Auditoriums are designed for citizens to passively receive what others have produced. They are great for presentation and performance, which leaves the audience with their backs turned to each other…

Classrooms are mostly designed for instruction. The usual layout says there will be one expert who knows, ten to three hundred students who are there to absorb what the expert knows… This arrangement gives little recognization to the importance of peer-to-peer learning…

Reception areas are mostly designed for security. The message is that you have to demonstrate your right to enter this building. Hardly the welcome that encourages belonging…

Hallways are designed for transportation…

Cafeterias are often designed as efficient refueling stations. The concern seems to be how many people can we feed and how quickly. Chairs, tables, walls, and food stations are set up for efficiency, easy maintenance, don’t linger, please get back to work…¹

You may be thinking to yourself… “Alex, a hallway is for transportation.” And that’s very true. That is a function hallways serve. But hallways can be so much more than that. Hallways in office settings (when we are working in offices) are where spontaneous interactions happen. One of my favorite examples of this is Jon Gertner’s book, The Idea Factory. The book details the rise and decline of Bell Labs (the research institute of AT&T) over the Twentieth Century. In his summary on The Rabbit Hole, Blas Moros summarizes well:

17. By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way. Members of the technical staff would often have both laboratories and small offices—but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute. By the same token, the long corridor for the wing that would house many of the physics researchers was intentionally made to be seven hundred feet in length. It was so long that to look down it from one end was to see the other end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible. Then again, that was the point. Walking down that impossibly long tiled corridor, a scientist on his way to lunch in the Murray Hill cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.²

Hallways are designed for transportation, even at Bell Labs. But they can be so much more than that. But hallways designed purely for transport at the expense of everything else will have difficulty serving any other purpose.

Thinking back to Block’s observations, Block is advocating for community and belonging.

• So what happens when we attempt to host a gathering to build those ideas in a conference room?

• What impact does the unspoken message of a person advocating for togetherness while speaking from an elevated platform have on the “content” of his speech?

• What implications does it have when we take the venue of one of the most intimate gatherings that a group of people can share–a meal–and reduce it to an “efficient refueling station”?

As we think back to Edward Hall, he harkens back to the mid-twentieth center language of technological extensions that we’ve explored with McLuhan a great deal. In that vein, Hall notes:

It is a mistake of the greatest magnitude to act as though man were one thing and his house or his cities, his technology or his language were something else. Because of the interrelationship between man and his extension, it behooves us to pay much more attention to what kinds of extensions we create, not only for ourselves but for others for whom they may be ill suited.³

So, as we go from here, some thoughts to consider:

• What decisions have you made about space out of ease counteract your intended function of the space?

• What messages do your spaces send about what you value?

• What’s one intentional change you can make to an environment to help it be more conducive to what you would like to happen there?

• If you are looking for a space to host a gathering, how much thought do you typically give to how that space will shape the conversations that can happen?

And with that, thanks for reading. See you again soon.

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Notes and further reading

• This is an excellent video summary of the main ideas of The Idea Factory from the author:

• If you prefer bullet-pointed lists, here’s one of those from another blog about The Idea Factory.

1. Community, 160-161

2. The Rabbit Hole: The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

3. The Hidden Dimension, 188