Space Meets Status Designing Workplace Performance

This book deals with the problems that are created when employers try to decrease the size of individual offices and workstations in order to increase work efficiency. Employees, who often regard their workspace as a "home from home," a retreat and a space that symbolizes their status and marks their territory feel threatened by this attempt to shrink "their" room.
Jacqueline Vischer summarizes significant research findings on office-space design and behavior from fields such as environmental psychology, architecture and interior design, employing terms that are accessible and interesting to practicing designers as well as business managers. Examples and case studies illustrate how space is a corporate resource, and how companies can improve their design decisions.
The book also examines the practical aspects of planning workspace for users. Worker productivity and stress levels are affected by lighting, ventilation, temperature, noise, and furniture layout. This book takes a new approach by showing howthe technical aspects of human comfort in terms of building systems does not always tally with users' perceptions and behavior. By understanding more about how these factors affect work performance, corporate managers and design professionals can plan, design and manage the layout of the work environment more effectively.

Showing how worker productivity and stress levels are affected by factors such as lighting, ventilation, temperature, noise and layout, this book demonstrates how the technical aspects of human comfort do not always tally with users' perceptions and behaviour. With vivid examples and case studies to illustrate how space is a corporate resource rather than simply overhead, Vischer reveals how companies can improve their ability to make design decisions on how best to accommodate their employees in a high quality workspace.

Foreword Fritz Steele 1. Kingdom, Castle, Office: The Space or Place We Work 2. The Organization-Accommodation Relationship: What Is It About Change? 3. Territoriality Examined: Being at Home at Work 4. Comfort and Productivity: Space as a Tool for Work 5. Environmental Improvement: Taking Control 6. The Workspace Transformation Imperative

Jacqueline C. Vischer is an environmental psychologist with a degree in Architecture. Until recently director of the consullting firm Buildings-In-Use which provided workplace consulting and design services to a variety of significant coproprate and government clients, she is now professor at the University of MOntreal, and founder and director of the New Work Environments Research Group (Groupe de Recherche sur les Environnements de Travail). She has written several pervious books on the human aspects of workspace, and her method of measuring the human impact of environmental conditions in offices is widely cited and used internationally.