CCB: [00:00:00] Welcome to the ONEder Podcast. This is your host CCB, and our conversation today is one in a series of three conversations that we're having with our 2024 ONEder Grant award winning teams. Just a little information or background on the ONEder Grant. It is a program started by One Workplace in 2019 to empower architects and designers to explore the impact of design on human behavior and the environment. And since 2019, we've given out 24 ONEder grants which have gone across the spectrum in looking at new and evolving research. And when I say across the spectrum, what that helped us understand was maybe we should tighten it up a little bit and ask people to all submit proposals around a particular theme. And so last year's theme was Embracing Change, and the nature of that was helping us all understand perhaps new ways of navigating the dynamic transformations that are taking place in any of the environments that we're working in. Today's ONEder Grant team is from Perkins Eastman, and they did this most interesting you're going to love it, study called Someplace Like Home: Leveraging the Science of Hominess at Work. Okay, first off, you got to love hominess as a word that's being used. And then second off, I'm going to say welcome to Widya and Katie from Perkins Eastman. And I'm going to ask you guys to introduce yourselves first. Widya, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Widya Ramadhani: [00:01:39] Yeah. Hi. Thanks for having me. My name is Widya. I am a design researcher at Perkins Eastman. My background is in architecture and human factors. I have a PhD in architecture. My research interest has been around the intersection of architecture and health. So how the built environment impact occupants health, including their physical, mental, cognitive, health across building types and life stages. Wow. So nice to meet you.

CCB: [00:02:05] Nice. Thank you so much. And Katie.

Katie Gluckselig: [00:02:08] Hi, CCB. Thank you so much for having me. I'm also a design strategist at Perkins Eastman. My background's in architecture, but I'm very interested in understanding the relationship between people and space and how the built environment influences the way people think and behave and feel in a space. Um, over the last few years especially, I've been heavily invested in our research for workplace and also just very interested in how to connect research to practice and turning those insights into things that we can really use as architects and designers. Oh no, I was going to say, wait a minute.

CCB: [00:02:47] I'm hoping that you'll share. Yeah., a little bit more about Perkins Eastman.

Katie Gluckselig: [00:02:50] Thank you. So Perkins Eastman is a large global firm. We have 24 studios around the world, and we do all kinds of things from architecture, interior design, planning and strategic consulting services. That includes a lot of practice areas, from workplace and healthcare to hospitality and large scale planning. But Widya and I are part of a human-centered consulting group within the firm, that brings together a group of people with really diverse backgrounds. We have backgrounds in business and neuroscience and environment behavior research and design, and we're focused on solving problems from a human centered perspective.

CCB: [00:03:37] Okay, I'm just going to say I'm really jealous. And I kind of want to come work for your team. But because I can't, I will now say that, to all of our listeners, for all of the ONEder grants, there is a page, that's dedicated to the research that each one of the teams has is done. So as we're talking through here, you will be able to reference back and download information and access a lot of the tools that Widya and Katie are going to mention. And you're going to be really wanting to do that, especially after you listen to what's going on here. I am going to ask the question you're kind of addressing, with your interest, what the inspiration might have been behind the research, but I'd love for you to kind of say what sparked the interest in Hominess. This is a two part question. What sparked the interest in Hominess and how are you defining Hominess?

Katie Gluckselig: [00:04:36] Um, I'll take that question. Thank you. So the reason we chose this topic is because of our first hand experience in corporate interiors and with our workplace clients, especially over the past several years, we've seen so many clients who are changing the way that they're working. They want to make a difference in their offices. They're introducing flexibility and maybe hybrid work. And so as we're navigating those changes with them, we're noticing that the office itself, the role of the office, is not what it used to be before the pandemic, um, pre-pandemic, you know, the office was a place where people just expected to come every day. It was assumed that that's where you would get your work done. Um, and those expectations changed so much during the pandemic. Um, things are swinging back a little bit now, but the role of the office has really become more collaborative. You need to have a reason to be there. You're meeting with people. It's a place for mentorship and culture building. And with all of these changes in the workplace, we're really interested in how the physical environment should respond to these new, new ways that people are working. Um, so when it comes to hominess, what we've noticed is that people are losing their home base at work. And this is for a few reasons. One is the prevalence of unassigned seating, where, you know, you're seeing hot desking or free address or hoteling.

Katie Gluckselig: [00:06:17] Um, but what that means is that there's not a 1 to 1 ratio of desks to people anymore. So you're not coming into the same seat every day. Um, another trend that has been on our radar for a while is the open plan seating, which is pretty polarizing. Um, and I think when you put these two things together, you have this perfect storm of, you know, people sitting in open spaces feeling exposed, maybe there're, you know, distractions. They're hearing people, seeing things. And they also, you know, don't feel like they have ownership of their own space. So we wanted to understand what that is doing to people. What does it mean when people are losing their sense of a home base at work? Um, and to answer your first question, the way that we define hominess is just the quality of space that makes you feel at home. So it's about physical and psychological comfort. Um, feeling at home in a space can reduce cognitive load or the mental effort that you're putting into, you know, scanning your environment and figuring out how you're going to interact with it. Um, and when you feel at home, the space is familiar. You know what to expect. Your brain just doesn't have to work as hard to interpret and process. And you have more bandwidth to be creative and, you know, Focus and do all of those important things for knowledge workers.

CCB: [00:07:54] Okay, I'm going to jump in here and say, on our website, there will be on the Perkins Eastman page, a link to the website that they've created to help put the context around this work. And it is so well done. I cannot applaud the entire team enough for building something that's so cohesive, explanatory, fun, and engaging. And it tells the story so, so well. So knowing that people can go and find that, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that research approach. How did you get at the meat of what it was you were trying to uncover?

Widya Ramadhani: [00:08:35] Yeah. So I can take that question. So the the big question that we have for this research is, first, you know, we have a conceptualization of what hominess is. The first thing that we are trying to understand is like, what are the barriers to hominess when you're working in a free address, open plan environments? So this part really understanding what are the challenges, you know, what hinders the feeling of hominess in one's workplace. And then the second one is after we are knowing we know all these challenges, how can behavior design enhance hominess in a free address open plan environment. So it's it started a very simple, you know, big question. And then to answer this we structure this study into a mixed method study. So we're using four main methods. The first one is a survey. We've done this survey before in our previous part of the study. And then we're enlarging the survey and focusing it more into holiness. So on the survey we survey about 477 knowledge workers to understand how important is the feeling of hominess for them in a work setting. And then after understanding how important it is, is what environmental elements that people associate with hominess. So we get that information as a starting point from the survey. And then going to the second step is observation. So we have two of our colleagues. We haven't mentioned that. We also work with Rebecca Milne, who is also the Associate Principal of Design Strategy at Perkins Eastman. We work with Doctor Hannah Negami, whose background is in neuroscience, also working in the previous ONEder grant research about creativity and workplace. We have Charlotte, who is whose background is industrial design, and we have Bob Condia, who is a professor emeritus at Kansas State University.

Widya Ramadhani: [00:10:22] So working with this diverse group of people we surveyed. So there's a quantitative part of the study. And then we look at the observation, looking at the behavior of people in four different types of workplace. So the first one is a technology company. And then we visited and also do observation at an architecture firm, a co-working cafe and also a public library. So it's really giving a wide range of workplace settings that are open, open space and free address. In these observations, the goal is really to understand the relationships between the space and what people do in the space, and in what way it supports or hinder their feeling of hominess. So this is the qualitative part of this research. After that observation, we also have a sample of volunteer employees who are working in these type of environments that we observe too, we call it a user experience diary. So they share to us about their workplace experience for different number of days. They can give us like artifacts. It could be like just jot down notes or a video or photos. So instead of us looking at what they're doing, this is really them sharing their experience firsthand to us. So really enrich the type of data that we get. So that's three. And then the last one is that we conducted workshop with industrial design students. This is really the last part after we analyze all other things. So we shared our initial findings and kind of like do an idea generation and validation with the students to bring forward this research in terms of like developing, um, you know, ideas, products that can leverage homeyness in a workplace environment.

CCB: [00:12:14] Oh my gosh, I'm, I need to like, take a little rest here and put a cold, damp cloth on my forehead. That's so much work. And again, it is impressive the way that all of this information comes together and, and can be simplified and be valuable in use for the clients that you're working with, to be able to understand and then parse out what's important. I also want to make a note here that, you know, in you're talking about looking at the library or looking at the knowledge workers. When we look at this information, it may have been done for a workplace, but it certainly has impact, broader impact across different types of environments because you're talking about the human being, the human experience in the environment. So I think that's something that we should just make note of, so that folks don't get too bogged down by, oh, this is a workplace study. Interesting. The, um, in all of those different tools or different tactics that you used to collect the information was there, what was the most surprising insight?

Widya Ramadhani: [00:13:23] Yeah. So something that's surprising, you know, it's what I really like about this research, is that we're acknowledging from the very beginning that there is, you know, good in the direction of, like moving into open place and open plans and free address environments. And there are also challenges. And that's exactly what we found here. We found like there's an inherent tensions in the experience of people who are working in a free address, open plan environments. So four things. The first one, the tension between autonomy and conformity. Right. Like the idea, oh yeah, you can you can choose the place that fits best to your needs and to your comfort. So that's great. We're giving autonomy to people, but at the end of the day, you are not the only one occupying that space, right? You're sharing that space with other people who are also, you know, practicing their autonomy. So there is a sense of like a limit to one's autonomy in a public space, which is going to like the conformity. There are behavioral norms, and there are guidelines in terms of like, how loud can you speak? And like, you know, you can't agree on a certain temperature. It's a free address model. Someone has to kind of you got to set up the temperature in certain, you know, positions. So there are some things that are still, you know, need a collective sharing in that sense. So it's the the tension between autonomy and conformity. So that's the first one that we found interesting. The second one is the freedom to choose. You can choose whenever you want. You can move as many times as you want in a day, right, with the many options available. But keep in mind that there is going to be a time cost to that. And it's not like you sit down to a new place and then you can head into productivity right away. There's some set of like comfort that you have to set up, right. The physical ergonomics, the cognitive ergonomics, technology. We love technologies, but there's, sometimes it's also hindering us to work faster. Right?

Widya Ramadhani: [00:15:29] So there's a tension between the freedom to choose versus the time to settle after you're making that choice. The third one is collaboration versus privacy. I think this is pretty well researched out there about open plan environment. You know, you don't have a lot of barriers. The idea is to encourage people to collaborate more. You know, having more visual contacts and more connection. But there's also a tension to that because it creates disruptions to engage in more of a heads down, focused, sensitive work. And then the last thing is the idea of like temporality and identity in a free address environment. Yes, you can claim a place, a workstation for a certain time, but that time-dependent nature really limits one's ability to further personalize their place, their workstation, in a way that reflects their identity. So there is going to be like a finding a sweet spot that it's not like a clean and like sterile environment that doesn't really spark anyone's personality. But, you know, so you kind of kind of find a middle ground between temporality versus identity in this type of space.

CCB: [00:16:40] Hmmm? Katie, let me ask you a question. Did you see, because you looked at those four different groups, did you find any significant differences in the way that they differ, the public library versus the knowledge workers, um, in the way that they approach the creating comfort in the addressing the nature of behavioral norms, I think is always fascinating. But I just wondered if it looked, if anything looked markedly different in the ways that you were seeing.

Katie Gluckselig: [00:17:13] Widya might be the best one to answer this question because she was closer to those.

Widya Ramadhani: [00:17:18] Yeah, um, that's a good question. I honestly haven't thought about it. Um, so when we get to the idea of like, affordances, because after after we identify the tensions, we're kind of going into, like, how do we create Hominess? And one of the things is sense of trust to the space. So it's not like not just to the space, but to the surrounding. And for the technical company and the architecture firm, this is regular people, right? They know they're they're kind of like part of a certain organization. So the sense of trust is very different than the sense of trust for people coming in a co-working space where like, everybody can come in and then the library. So the idea of, um, leaving towels on the beach, we found it in the co-working space and in the public library. Right. Like they want to they want that seat. And sometimes we're humans. We need to take bio breaks. We need to order the coffee. And, like, we got to look for the books, something like that. So they they're using their personal belongings to claim the space and like it's it's a very different where where you're working in an office, right. You come in, you have your own kind of like locker, and then you just use that space, you know, once you logged in, like, we're just using that table, right? That computer is on, it's under someone's username. So there's like a sense of trust is very different in that type of environment because one you have some kind of like regular. So you have a shared identity going to that space. And the other one is like really open to public, but you're trying to kind of like create your own space in a way and also declare it that you are there at the moment and you know, you don't want to leave, kind of like your laptops and stuff in a space that you don't feel comfortable leaving.

CCB: [00:19:07] I love the the idea of "towels on the beach". I'm going to carry that one forward. Okay, so you've got all this amazing research and you're looking at it and and ideally there's strategies that you're going to kind of pull together or, or land upon that might help create environments that feel more homey. So I think you just kind of addressed address that, that nature of trust. But there there were four that you call out that I think are really, really, uh, spot on. So who wants to tell us about key strategies to create a workplace that feels like home?

Katie Gluckselig: [00:19:46] I can take this one. Um, so I think something that stands out to us is that in our research, we found that if we had to have, say, four pillars of hominess, we'd be looking at comfort, both physical and psychological comfort, familiarity, trust, which we talked about, and a sense of ownership. And it's almost like the condition of the modern office targets all four of those things. If you're in an open plan office environment and you don't have a seat of your own, all of the research says that can be a problem for creativity being productive. You know, if you feel like you're sitting in a space where you're being surveilled, you know, you sense that you're being watched, that definitely chips away at your cognitive load. Um, I think that open plan seating and unassigned seats are not going anywhere because they really are based in necessity, right? We're in the new way of working. People aren't expected to be necessarily in the office synchronously, like they might be, you know, a distributed team. And it just doesn't make sense to have, you know, an allocation for every single employee, whether or not they're going to be there. Um, but I think, like where the problem is that, you know, if you're making decisions based on assumptions, like if there are no walls in the office, then people will automatically talk to each other more. You have to actually find out if that's true, because, you know, now there's a Harvard study that shows that actually people collaborate face to face less when they're in an open plan office. Um, and so I think that part of what the ONEder Grant has enabled us to do is just go a little bit deeper with this research and ask the questions and, um, just kind of poke at, you know, is this true? What does it mean? How can we make the experience better?

CCB: [00:21:39] I have all my little notes that I was looking at. And then there was that, um, 86% of respondents to your survey considered it important to feel at home. And the number one was physical comfort, which takes us back to a conversation that we started kind of earlier before we started recording, which was people are people first, and then they come into whatever the environment is. Um, and I wonder when you looked at the, the four kind of strategies or the, the pillars, how does that then translate into recommendations or suggestions or thoughts about how environments might evolve?

Widya Ramadhani: [00:22:19] So comfort comes first. Like that's physical comfort. But sometimes people limit it into like, oh yeah, ergonomic chair and desk, right? No, it's like it's beyond. It's like like psychological comfort. We also heard from our survey the qualitative part of the survey. They're like, you know, like being in a space where you like the community. You don't feel judged by the community. That's also comfort, right? So don't forget when we're trying to think about how do you create homeyness, like, should I include, like this really warm lighting and like, you know, plants like, yeah, that's great. Actually, that's one of the strategies that we mentioned under familiarity. But don't forget that architecture is part of a whole system. There is a social system and there's a cultural system. And making change in one thing, say making physical things in the built environment should be, you know, intentionally paired with some policy change and cultural change, because together that will help us closer to homeyness. So that's one thing I mentioned about familiarity. Familiarity is like the idea that you, you already feel like, intimately know the space and physically and emotionally comfortable. I mentioned biophilia or innate connection with nature, you know, like some a warm ambience through like, lighting texture. Um, one thing that I love in one of this are finding is I mentioned earlier about like, you can't really individually personalize this space, right? Because like somebody else might gonna use it next the next day.

Widya Ramadhani: [00:23:48] But we found this in in several of our site observations. There is a sense of shared personalization. Yes. You can't give individual personalization. You can't like put your family photo, wedding photos, kids photos and like your table. There's gonna be a lot of work. But they're the walls. There are the common areas, you know, there's the lounge that you go and there you as human and your coworkers are collaborating and interacting. So you can, um, kind of decide on how do you beautify and decorate this space and create something where you can contribute together. We found like a basketball hoop. So it's it's like it's a playfulness in a space when people just got out of a very stressful meeting and just like, throw some balls and like somebody would come in and join. So the invest in displays and activities that encourage people to collectively personalize this space. So collective personalization that's my my favorite part. Um, and then think about, you know, our our innate needs as human. We, we need to eat we need to take bio breaks and we need to take a nap. Maybe, you know, provide convenience to take that. Micro breaks is also kind of important to the sense of familiarity in this space. So that's kind of like some examples that we found.

CCB: [00:25:02] That's fantastic. Okay. Now it makes me think of and I don't want to go down a rabbit hole at all. But, one of last year's ONEder grants was dealing with neuroinclusivity, designing for inclusivity. And you're saying this without specifically saying this. There's an implicit suggestion that a wider variety of types of spaces and environments will be most supportive to the collective.

Katie Gluckselig: [00:25:31] That's a great observation. Actually, because when you're talking about inclusive design for neurodiversity, which we've done a little bit of research on ourselves, it's a much better approach to make sure you're providing variety and choice, because there's really no one environment that is going to be, you know, suitable to everyone. And autonomy plays into that too. But in the same way, homeyness is a very subjective experience, right? It's based on the things that are familiar to us personally. You know, the preferences and the things that we associate with certain objects, like it's just different. I remember one thing that's kind of funny. We talked, before the podcast about, like, things that we should share among ourselves with the group. And Hannah on our team mentioned the show Severance. And I said to her, oh, I couldn't get into it because the environment, the office environment is just so drab. It's kind of like life sucking. And Hannah said, oh, I love the office environment in Severance. It's such a clean aesthetic and the chairs are so beautiful. And I just, I thought, that is a perfect example of just the subjective experience of a space, right? To me, I can't wait to get out of there or turn off the TV. And to someone else it's like, you know, the reason they watch the show.

CCB: [00:26:55] It's fascinating because I have a whole host of questions that kind of get at what might recommendations be, but you're talking about them as, as we're sitting here having this conversation, you're talking about tools that organizations might consider. And they're not just about the space. Widya, to your point, there's policies and there's how do we how do you build culture? And so how do you recognize it or support it? To your point, Katie, what's the breadth of, or the scope of how it needs to be inclusive to embrace all the users. I wonder in moving forward, Perkins Eastman has such a huge presence across the globe. Isn't that interesting? How might this look? You know, if we move from a culture of, you know, US workers to a culture that's not.

Widya Ramadhani: [00:27:47] Me and Katie just had that conversation. Why it's important to think about the culture. So I was born and raised in Indonesia. We have a high power distance. So, you know, just like referring to my boss, I can't just say names, right? It's very uncomfortable if you just take a someone who work in Indonesia, like their whole life, move here, and then like, just having a conversation with the CEO of, of a company and just like addressing the CEO by the first name, it's going to be, like, sweaty and like very uncomfortable. So So imagine you're creating this like free address environment and open plan environment in those two settings and give the same prompt like you can do whatever you want here. And for um, in a in a culture where there is a short power distance, everyone feels they have the same agency to make interventions to this space, to to change things, to add on displays and to, to even share their ideas, you know, starting different things and come up with cultures and whatnot. But in a country or in a culture with a high power distance, you're going to see that like the higher ups are likely to make changes, but not the people who are just starting or like even the middle, you know, the middle level, because there is a sense of like, can I do this? Like if, you know, if there's no clear policy that, you know, stating that, yes, you can, there's going to be a two different behavior coming out and making changes in this environment.

CCB: [00:29:24] That's a great observation and the nature of of cultural agency. I remember working on a project with a Dutch firm that was a tech company here in the US, and we created mini cafes that had technology in them so that they could be work cafes as well. No one used them. That was just like what? And you know, there was a disconnect, obviously, in programming and having the conversation and "Oh yeah, that sounded good". But literally, unless it was, there was some explicit permission given, people felt like that looked like I wasn't working and so they wouldn't take advantage of them. We're coming at the end of our time. I'm so regretful that we cannot, you know, have this conversation forever. But the the idea of clarity and communications and explicit acceptance of terms, understanding what you know, what you're describing, and having agreement so that people can move forward is you've done a great job in explaining them. And I think I'm going to also remind our listeners that you can go to the you're going to be able to go to their website and see how very clearly and very comfortable and accessible the the descriptions are. So Widya and Katie, we're at the end of our time. I'm so sorry, but if there's anything else that you wanted to share, one little nugget or some reinforce something that we talked about, is there anything that you feel you'd like to give as parting words of wisdom?

Katie Gluckselig: [00:30:55] My thought in this research and most of the research we do, is just that there's so much room to change and improve the experience of people using a space. When you learn a little bit more about how to move the needle on that experience, like the a study like this has just changed the way that we think about free address and unassigned seating and even like for myself personally, when I'm in my home office, you know, I'm thinking about how to change the space around me to be more comfortable, like taking the time to adjust my task lamp or put up a, you know, more pictures of my kids drawings. So, um, yeah, that's my thought. It's just lots of potential.

CCB: [00:31:39] It's a nugget that you get to take away. Every single person gets to take away just kind of what is that permission that you give yourself? Interesting. Anything from you, Widya?

Widya Ramadhani: [00:31:48] For me, it's like from the designer perspective, have a conversation because everyone has a different sense of what makes them feel at home. And we shouldn't forget that feeling at home encounters like physical comfort, but also psychological comfort. So thinking holistically in that way, but also when we're coming up with strategy, thinking about architecture not as a, or Interiors, as an exclusive thing, but it goes hand in hand with, you know, the policy changes and also the cultural changes, because at the end of the day, we're designing for human and human is a very complex being that not just functions as a physical being, but there's a social being as well. So yeah, that's fantastic.

CCB: [00:32:33] All right. Thank you. Katie and Widya from Perkins Eastman. I'm going to remind us all that the ONEder podcast is available on all streaming services. And remember, there are two more ONEder Grant podcasts that will be available and listening to what each one of the teams has to offer this year relative to embracing change is fascinating, because there definitely are threads that continue through each one of the conversations. Again, to your point, Widya, because we're all human beings, thank you so much. And I'm going to sign off from the ONEnder podcast. Bye bye.