In 1926, the US Army designed its first airplane cockpit, doing so based on the average dimensions of its pilots. This had two important consequences.
Firstly, it meant that new pilots were recruited to a large extent on the basis of their ability to fit into these cockpits, rather than their ability to fly a plane.
Secondly, in 1947 when the newly created US Air Force expanded, the new pilots could not keep control of their planes, leading to hundreds of accidents. Officials concluded that late 1940s pilots had physically outgrown the 1920s cockpit, so rigidly designed for the average pilot of yesterday.
In many ways, as an industry we are making the same mistake when designing and creating offices. We’ve often been guilty of basing workplace design around our idea of an ‘average’ worker, rather than the diverse collection of individuals that make up our workforce. Open plan offices are a well-known and widely debated example of this.
However, we’re starting to understand that not only are our offices not always optimised for their current employees, they are in many ways excluding an enormous potential workforce. We’re recruiting the kinds of people we believe can thrive in the workplaces we have built, rather than building workplaces that enable those who could best meet the needs of a business – now and looking towards the future.
At the end of May, I’ll stand on a stage in Berlin in front of hundreds of individuals from the office sector at the British Council for Offices Annual 2018 Conference to address this challenge. The theme of this year’s conference is ’diversity and inclusion’ and I, along with my fellow speakers at the conference, will aim to convey not just how designing offices to be inclusive of a diverse workforce is important, but that it is eminently possible.
To achieve this, we need first to understand better as an industry what ‘diversity’ is and what it means in the context of the workforce.
Who is our new normal? The way we think, react and learn is changing. People are not one size fits all. Gender diversity is a part of this mix, of course, but a diverse workforce also encompasses people of a wide age range, people from different cultures and backgrounds, and those of different physical sizes. Once we better have this understanding, we can begin to think about how to design offices to allow a diverse workforce to work more effectively.
Designing for much older workers, for example, will mean ensuring an office can be navigated and traversed with physical ease. To compensate for the reduced eyesight that can come with advanced age, for example, we’ll have to take the idea of texture, contrast and even smell a lot further than we have ever done before to achieve this.
For people significantly below, or above, ‘average’ height, we must not only adapt the physical environment (heights of desks or lockers) but also reconsider aesthetics – to design the office from a lowered or heightened line of sight.