Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
這些觸手可及的可能性激發了許多人的創意靈感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker這樣的辦公場所設計顧問，他是Blum在扎哈事務所的合作伙伴，曾經還在福斯特事務所擔任辦公場所設計負責人。他說：“曾經的辦公模式很難進行多方會談，因此各個項目只能通過領導進行對接。如果你有20名員工，那麼你就有相應的事務需要處理，可是現在，我們可以同時管理4000名員工。”Kaicker的策略證明，在這種員工數量巨大的辦公模式中，辦公場所仍然能夠完美地適應不同的需求。“這極高地提升了客戶體驗，每個工作空間都與眾不同，因此每位員工都能夠找到適合自己的辦公場所，這種模式前所未有。”
但是，並非所有的建築師都在對此進行研究，對於布魯克林建築事務所Inaba Williams的負責人Jeffrey Inaba來說，他認為高效辦公場所設計的關鍵並不在於充足的信息拉遠，而是在於思維模式，例如建築能夠如何改善整個企業。那些能夠呼應未來發展的商業空間，無論是快速增長還是下跌，這些空間都應該確保，辦公建築應當全面地服務於整個企業。“真正的建築服務應當是瞭解客戶的需求，建築師應當思考可以在這個設計中加入哪些元素，而不是所謂的合不合適。”Inaba說。
數字化商業模式正在將眾多需求引入辦公場所，這是一種針對範圍更廣、並且更為真實的商業模式，因為這種模式的客戶絕大多數來源於網絡。“這裡的人們意識到，隨著世界逐步虛擬化，工作方式也更加靈活，建築也應當更加適應未來的發展模式。這種方式之所以能夠脫穎而出、形成特殊的空間，這是因為它們更加切合實際。”
高效工作場所的定義並非一成不變，對於Inaba來說，每個客戶的需求各不相同，他認為：“在許多情況下，物理狀態的改變往往具有針對性，設計需要解決的就是設計師需要了解的問題。”
These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
這些觸手可及的可能性激發了許多人的創意靈感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker這樣的辦公場所設計顧問，他是Blum在扎哈事務所的合作伙伴，曾經還在福斯特事務所擔任辦公場所設計負責人。他說：“曾經的辦公模式很難進行多方會談，因此各個項目只能通過領導進行對接。如果你有20名員工，那麼你就有相應的事務需要處理，可是現在，我們可以同時管理4000名員工。”Kaicker的策略證明，在這種員工數量巨大的辦公模式中，辦公場所仍然能夠完美地適應不同的需求。“這極高地提升了客戶體驗，每個工作空間都與眾不同，因此每位員工都能夠找到適合自己的辦公場所，這種模式前所未有。”
但是，並非所有的建築師都在對此進行研究，對於布魯克林建築事務所Inaba Williams的負責人Jeffrey Inaba來說，他認為高效辦公場所設計的關鍵並不在於充足的信息拉遠，而是在於思維模式，例如建築能夠如何改善整個企業。那些能夠呼應未來發展的商業空間，無論是快速增長還是下跌，這些空間都應該確保，辦公建築應當全面地服務於整個企業。“真正的建築服務應當是瞭解客戶的需求，建築師應當思考可以在這個設計中加入哪些元素，而不是所謂的合不合適。”Inaba說。
數字化商業模式正在將眾多需求引入辦公場所，這是一種針對範圍更廣、並且更為真實的商業模式，因為這種模式的客戶絕大多數來源於網絡。“這裡的人們意識到，隨著世界逐步虛擬化，工作方式也更加靈活，建築也應當更加適應未來的發展模式。這種方式之所以能夠脫穎而出、形成特殊的空間，這是因為它們更加切合實際。”
高效工作場所的定義並非一成不變，對於Inaba來說，每個客戶的需求各不相同，他認為：“在許多情況下，物理狀態的改變往往具有針對性，設計需要解決的就是設計師需要了解的問題。”
These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
這些觸手可及的可能性激發了許多人的創意靈感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker這樣的辦公場所設計顧問，他是Blum在扎哈事務所的合作伙伴，曾經還在福斯特事務所擔任辦公場所設計負責人。他說：“曾經的辦公模式很難進行多方會談，因此各個項目只能通過領導進行對接。如果你有20名員工，那麼你就有相應的事務需要處理，可是現在，我們可以同時管理4000名員工。”Kaicker的策略證明，在這種員工數量巨大的辦公模式中，辦公場所仍然能夠完美地適應不同的需求。“這極高地提升了客戶體驗，每個工作空間都與眾不同，因此每位員工都能夠找到適合自己的辦公場所，這種模式前所未有。”
但是，並非所有的建築師都在對此進行研究，對於布魯克林建築事務所Inaba Williams的負責人Jeffrey Inaba來說，他認為高效辦公場所設計的關鍵並不在於充足的信息拉遠，而是在於思維模式，例如建築能夠如何改善整個企業。那些能夠呼應未來發展的商業空間，無論是快速增長還是下跌，這些空間都應該確保，辦公建築應當全面地服務於整個企業。“真正的建築服務應當是瞭解客戶的需求，建築師應當思考可以在這個設計中加入哪些元素，而不是所謂的合不合適。”Inaba說。
數字化商業模式正在將眾多需求引入辦公場所，這是一種針對範圍更廣、並且更為真實的商業模式，因為這種模式的客戶絕大多數來源於網絡。“這裡的人們意識到，隨著世界逐步虛擬化，工作方式也更加靈活，建築也應當更加適應未來的發展模式。這種方式之所以能夠脫穎而出、形成特殊的空間，這是因為它們更加切合實際。”
高效工作場所的定義並非一成不變，對於Inaba來說，每個客戶的需求各不相同，他認為：“在許多情況下，物理狀態的改變往往具有針對性，設計需要解決的就是設計師需要了解的問題。”
These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
這些觸手可及的可能性激發了許多人的創意靈感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker這樣的辦公場所設計顧問，他是Blum在扎哈事務所的合作伙伴，曾經還在福斯特事務所擔任辦公場所設計負責人。他說：“曾經的辦公模式很難進行多方會談，因此各個項目只能通過領導進行對接。如果你有20名員工，那麼你就有相應的事務需要處理，可是現在，我們可以同時管理4000名員工。”Kaicker的策略證明，在這種員工數量巨大的辦公模式中，辦公場所仍然能夠完美地適應不同的需求。“這極高地提升了客戶體驗，每個工作空間都與眾不同，因此每位員工都能夠找到適合自己的辦公場所，這種模式前所未有。”
但是，並非所有的建築師都在對此進行研究，對於布魯克林建築事務所Inaba Williams的負責人Jeffrey Inaba來說，他認為高效辦公場所設計的關鍵並不在於充足的信息拉遠，而是在於思維模式，例如建築能夠如何改善整個企業。那些能夠呼應未來發展的商業空間，無論是快速增長還是下跌，這些空間都應該確保，辦公建築應當全面地服務於整個企業。“真正的建築服務應當是瞭解客戶的需求，建築師應當思考可以在這個設計中加入哪些元素，而不是所謂的合不合適。”Inaba說。
數字化商業模式正在將眾多需求引入辦公場所，這是一種針對範圍更廣、並且更為真實的商業模式，因為這種模式的客戶絕大多數來源於網絡。“這裡的人們意識到，隨著世界逐步虛擬化，工作方式也更加靈活，建築也應當更加適應未來的發展模式。這種方式之所以能夠脫穎而出、形成特殊的空間，這是因為它們更加切合實際。”
高效工作場所的定義並非一成不變，對於Inaba來說，每個客戶的需求各不相同，他認為：“在許多情況下，物理狀態的改變往往具有針對性，設計需要解決的就是設計師需要了解的問題。”
These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
Image © Naho Kubota
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
這些觸手可及的可能性激發了許多人的創意靈感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker這樣的辦公場所設計顧問，他是Blum在扎哈事務所的合作伙伴，曾經還在福斯特事務所擔任辦公場所設計負責人。他說：“曾經的辦公模式很難進行多方會談，因此各個項目只能通過領導進行對接。如果你有20名員工，那麼你就有相應的事務需要處理，可是現在，我們可以同時管理4000名員工。”Kaicker的策略證明，在這種員工數量巨大的辦公模式中，辦公場所仍然能夠完美地適應不同的需求。“這極高地提升了客戶體驗，每個工作空間都與眾不同，因此每位員工都能夠找到適合自己的辦公場所，這種模式前所未有。”
但是，並非所有的建築師都在對此進行研究，對於布魯克林建築事務所Inaba Williams的負責人Jeffrey Inaba來說，他認為高效辦公場所設計的關鍵並不在於充足的信息拉遠，而是在於思維模式，例如建築能夠如何改善整個企業。那些能夠呼應未來發展的商業空間，無論是快速增長還是下跌，這些空間都應該確保，辦公建築應當全面地服務於整個企業。“真正的建築服務應當是瞭解客戶的需求，建築師應當思考可以在這個設計中加入哪些元素，而不是所謂的合不合適。”Inaba說。
數字化商業模式正在將眾多需求引入辦公場所，這是一種針對範圍更廣、並且更為真實的商業模式，因為這種模式的客戶絕大多數來源於網絡。“這裡的人們意識到，隨著世界逐步虛擬化，工作方式也更加靈活，建築也應當更加適應未來的發展模式。這種方式之所以能夠脫穎而出、形成特殊的空間，這是因為它們更加切合實際。”
高效工作場所的定義並非一成不變，對於Inaba來說，每個客戶的需求各不相同，他認為：“在許多情況下，物理狀態的改變往往具有針對性，設計需要解決的就是設計師需要了解的問題。”
These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
這些觸手可及的可能性激發了許多人的創意靈感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker這樣的辦公場所設計顧問，他是Blum在扎哈事務所的合作伙伴，曾經還在福斯特事務所擔任辦公場所設計負責人。他說：“曾經的辦公模式很難進行多方會談，因此各個項目只能通過領導進行對接。如果你有20名員工，那麼你就有相應的事務需要處理，可是現在，我們可以同時管理4000名員工。”Kaicker的策略證明，在這種員工數量巨大的辦公模式中，辦公場所仍然能夠完美地適應不同的需求。“這極高地提升了客戶體驗，每個工作空間都與眾不同，因此每位員工都能夠找到適合自己的辦公場所，這種模式前所未有。”
但是，並非所有的建築師都在對此進行研究，對於布魯克林建築事務所Inaba Williams的負責人Jeffrey Inaba來說，他認為高效辦公場所設計的關鍵並不在於充足的信息拉遠，而是在於思維模式，例如建築能夠如何改善整個企業。那些能夠呼應未來發展的商業空間，無論是快速增長還是下跌，這些空間都應該確保，辦公建築應當全面地服務於整個企業。“真正的建築服務應當是瞭解客戶的需求，建築師應當思考可以在這個設計中加入哪些元素，而不是所謂的合不合適。”Inaba說。
數字化商業模式正在將眾多需求引入辦公場所，這是一種針對範圍更廣、並且更為真實的商業模式，因為這種模式的客戶絕大多數來源於網絡。“這裡的人們意識到，隨著世界逐步虛擬化，工作方式也更加靈活，建築也應當更加適應未來的發展模式。這種方式之所以能夠脫穎而出、形成特殊的空間，這是因為它們更加切合實際。”
高效工作場所的定義並非一成不變，對於Inaba來說，每個客戶的需求各不相同，他認為：“在許多情況下，物理狀態的改變往往具有針對性，設計需要解決的就是設計師需要了解的問題。”
These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
這些觸手可及的可能性激發了許多人的創意靈感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker這樣的辦公場所設計顧問，他是Blum在扎哈事務所的合作伙伴，曾經還在福斯特事務所擔任辦公場所設計負責人。他說：“曾經的辦公模式很難進行多方會談，因此各個項目只能通過領導進行對接。如果你有20名員工，那麼你就有相應的事務需要處理，可是現在，我們可以同時管理4000名員工。”Kaicker的策略證明，在這種員工數量巨大的辦公模式中，辦公場所仍然能夠完美地適應不同的需求。“這極高地提升了客戶體驗，每個工作空間都與眾不同，因此每位員工都能夠找到適合自己的辦公場所，這種模式前所未有。”
但是，並非所有的建築師都在對此進行研究，對於布魯克林建築事務所Inaba Williams的負責人Jeffrey Inaba來說，他認為高效辦公場所設計的關鍵並不在於充足的信息拉遠，而是在於思維模式，例如建築能夠如何改善整個企業。那些能夠呼應未來發展的商業空間，無論是快速增長還是下跌，這些空間都應該確保，辦公建築應當全面地服務於整個企業。“真正的建築服務應當是瞭解客戶的需求，建築師應當思考可以在這個設計中加入哪些元素，而不是所謂的合不合適。”Inaba說。
數字化商業模式正在將眾多需求引入辦公場所，這是一種針對範圍更廣、並且更為真實的商業模式，因為這種模式的客戶絕大多數來源於網絡。“這裡的人們意識到，隨著世界逐步虛擬化，工作方式也更加靈活，建築也應當更加適應未來的發展模式。這種方式之所以能夠脫穎而出、形成特殊的空間，這是因為它們更加切合實際。”
高效工作場所的定義並非一成不變，對於Inaba來說，每個客戶的需求各不相同，他認為：“在許多情況下，物理狀態的改變往往具有針對性，設計需要解決的就是設計師需要了解的問題。”
These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
這些觸手可及的可能性激發了許多人的創意靈感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker這樣的辦公場所設計顧問，他是Blum在扎哈事務所的合作伙伴，曾經還在福斯特事務所擔任辦公場所設計負責人。他說：“曾經的辦公模式很難進行多方會談，因此各個項目只能通過領導進行對接。如果你有20名員工，那麼你就有相應的事務需要處理，可是現在，我們可以同時管理4000名員工。”Kaicker的策略證明，在這種員工數量巨大的辦公模式中，辦公場所仍然能夠完美地適應不同的需求。“這極高地提升了客戶體驗，每個工作空間都與眾不同，因此每位員工都能夠找到適合自己的辦公場所，這種模式前所未有。”
但是，並非所有的建築師都在對此進行研究，對於布魯克林建築事務所Inaba Williams的負責人Jeffrey Inaba來說，他認為高效辦公場所設計的關鍵並不在於充足的信息拉遠，而是在於思維模式，例如建築能夠如何改善整個企業。那些能夠呼應未來發展的商業空間，無論是快速增長還是下跌，這些空間都應該確保，辦公建築應當全面地服務於整個企業。“真正的建築服務應當是瞭解客戶的需求，建築師應當思考可以在這個設計中加入哪些元素，而不是所謂的合不合適。”Inaba說。
數字化商業模式正在將眾多需求引入辦公場所，這是一種針對範圍更廣、並且更為真實的商業模式，因為這種模式的客戶絕大多數來源於網絡。“這裡的人們意識到，隨著世界逐步虛擬化，工作方式也更加靈活，建築也應當更加適應未來的發展模式。這種方式之所以能夠脫穎而出、形成特殊的空間，這是因為它們更加切合實際。”
高效工作場所的定義並非一成不變，對於Inaba來說，每個客戶的需求各不相同，他認為：“在許多情況下，物理狀態的改變往往具有針對性，設計需要解決的就是設計師需要了解的問題。”
These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
大師建築事務所已採用大數據進行辦公設計
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data
本文最初發表於《Metropolis Magazine》，標題為“擁有大數據的建築師才能清晰地看清項目”。
能夠提升員工工作效率的辦公場所一直是企業管理者的一大難題。但是在許多現代辦公場所誕生之前，許多設計師和研究者已經就這個問題進行了長時間的鑽研，例如那些能夠提升員工效率的工廠。在20世紀60年代，赫爾曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的辦公傢俱生產線的發明者羅伯特•普羅斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已經對工作空間進行了探索，然後便有了現代化辦公隔間的產生。
辦公場所的發展很大程度上依賴於企業管理人員對員工的有效觀察與判斷。在當前社會，急速的發展讓設計師能夠將更多先進的方式運用於辦公場所的設計中，例如傳感器、互聯網傢俱裝置，以及數據分析。倫敦建築師Uli Blum說：“你應該充分考慮每一位員工，每個人都有不同的需求。如果想要設計出好的辦公空間，那麼這便是最根本的問題，因此最直接的方式便是直接詢問。”但是，如果要通過一個設計滿足成百上千員工的需求，那麼這就有些不切實際。
This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.
ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
三年前，Blum在扎哈建築事務所（ZHA）進行模塊單元分析與觀察的工作，其團隊早早地便將工作重心放在工作場所的研究之中。因此，Blum決定從自己的辦公室下手：“我們在自己的辦公室裡安裝了傳感器，這樣能夠更好地瞭解整個空間。”這組裝置能夠監控空氣密度、噪音、溼度、光線、溫度、空氣質量，其中還設置有智能監控攝像頭，它能夠追蹤辦公人員的所處位置，同時還能保證員工的隱私。Blum說：“他們並不知道自己看到的那個人是誰。”
Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.
Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
辦公試點能夠測試出最適合員工的工作空間。因此這也能成為證明企業標誌性審美因素的工具。他說：“設計師能夠創造美麗的形狀，但是我們需要證明，為什麼我們設計出的形狀比別人的更好，那麼這就涉及到方法的比較，這其中就包含有空間數據信息。”
Blum建議，高效辦公空間的設計並沒有標準，它是一個整體性空間，同時滿足個人的需求。在這種思路之中，他同以往的設計師分享了這樣的一種基本假設，即空間既能讓使用功能更加完善，同時也能讓使用者用起來感到十分不便，換句話說，水能載舟亦能覆舟。對於設計師來說，其中的挑戰在於找到空間的不同對功能組織的影響。
在20世紀初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工業辦公環境而聞名，他的工作成果對現代化辦公場所的發展也具有極大的影響。Taylor開創了先進的科學管理領域，根據敏銳的觀察，簡化工業生產過程，從而大大提高工業生產效率。Taylor的學生通過了解機器、員工與工廠之間的相互關係，明確了現代辦公場所的基本原則，即這是人、場所、工作機器之間的集合。夫妻檔Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth與Taylor聞名於同一時代，他們通過減少不必要的時間與人力浪費來將員工的生產力發揮得淋漓盡致，他們認為，工作中的許多重複動作都不必要，因此，他們發明的技術大大地提升了員工的工作實際輸出量。但是這種方法也具有侷限性，因為工人只能通過快速地移動來完成任務，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲勞。
那麼如何克服這一障礙呢？唯一的辦法便是將改造的重點從員工自身效率轉移到辦公場所之中，並且充分了解空間自身是否具有緩解壓力、提升員工健康狀況的特質。在上世紀末、本世紀初，為了提升機器的工作效率，工廠中安裝了空調，這也是對工作環境改善的一大代表，這樣的想法明顯有效，因此在現代辦公場所中，空調愈發普及，早期的研究者認為，這種方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。
The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
如今，與Blum同等地位的辦公場所設計專員也同樣關注辦公環境與員工效率之間的關係，但是，現代工作方式不斷地發展，那麼設計的方法也應該不斷變化。傢俱製造商Steelcase最近研發了一種數字物理基礎設備，通過網絡工作，很好地組織利用空間。Steelcase的產品經理Scott Sadler說：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作場所已成為擺設。”名為“Smart + Connected辦公場所”的概念應運而生，其研發目標是減少實體辦公場所和會議室的使用，同時也幫助企業管理者更好地瞭解其辦公室的運用狀況。辦公場所安裝有傳感器、標識設備和相應傢俱，然後通過專用應用程序收集數據，員工只需要在自身方便的場所就能夠與其他合作者進行一場會議討論，這種程序甚至還能夠讓在不同地點辦公的員工們進行多方會談。“我們希望能夠整合所有的數據，讓員工最有效地進行辦公。”Sadler如是說道。
Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
這些觸手可及的可能性激發了許多人的創意靈感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker這樣的辦公場所設計顧問，他是Blum在扎哈事務所的合作伙伴，曾經還在福斯特事務所擔任辦公場所設計負責人。他說：“曾經的辦公模式很難進行多方會談，因此各個項目只能通過領導進行對接。如果你有20名員工，那麼你就有相應的事務需要處理，可是現在，我們可以同時管理4000名員工。”Kaicker的策略證明，在這種員工數量巨大的辦公模式中，辦公場所仍然能夠完美地適應不同的需求。“這極高地提升了客戶體驗，每個工作空間都與眾不同，因此每位員工都能夠找到適合自己的辦公場所，這種模式前所未有。”
但是，並非所有的建築師都在對此進行研究，對於布魯克林建築事務所Inaba Williams的負責人Jeffrey Inaba來說，他認為高效辦公場所設計的關鍵並不在於充足的信息拉遠，而是在於思維模式，例如建築能夠如何改善整個企業。那些能夠呼應未來發展的商業空間，無論是快速增長還是下跌，這些空間都應該確保，辦公建築應當全面地服務於整個企業。“真正的建築服務應當是瞭解客戶的需求，建築師應當思考可以在這個設計中加入哪些元素，而不是所謂的合不合適。”Inaba說。
數字化商業模式正在將眾多需求引入辦公場所，這是一種針對範圍更廣、並且更為真實的商業模式，因為這種模式的客戶絕大多數來源於網絡。“這裡的人們意識到，隨著世界逐步虛擬化，工作方式也更加靈活，建築也應當更加適應未來的發展模式。這種方式之所以能夠脫穎而出、形成特殊的空間，這是因為它們更加切合實際。”
高效工作場所的定義並非一成不變，對於Inaba來說，每個客戶的需求各不相同，他認為：“在許多情況下，物理狀態的改變往往具有針對性，設計需要解決的就是設計師需要了解的問題。”
These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”
Image Courtesy of Humanscale
Image Courtesy of Steelcase
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Naho Kubota
Image © Iwan Baan
Image © Iwan Baan
這篇文章是“tech x interiors”的部分專欄，由設計工作室Studio O+A主要編輯。這個專欄於2018年4月發佈於《都市雜誌》上，討論了關於工作場所的設計問題。
This article is part of the “tech x interiors” special section that was guest-edited by the design firm Studio O+A. The section, which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Metropolis Magazine, explores how technology is reshaping the workplace. You can find the full section online here.
由專築網李韌，曹逸希編譯
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