Losing Touch

Making coffee to a group of designers/architects always proved to be challenging. Never mind the personal taste they each had of how to drink their coffee, but you couldn't even pour it into the mugs lined up, everyone switched them up. 

It was almost ritual like -- one would come to the mugs lined up on the countertop, pick the mug up turn it 15 degrees left, then right, then look at the bottom of the mug, only then would one hold it with both hands, and if it felt like the right fit for that day -- you were able to pour the coffee into the mug. I can not make this stuff up. 

In the last few years more and more tactile biofeedback giving elements of our lives are disappearing. From the click-click-click of the typing machine to a touch screen, from turning a key to operate a car to pushing a button. It's almost like we are losing the ability to feel what we are supposed to do, that we are unlearning our brain to be able to decipher nuance of touch, a very primal part of our being. Some will claim this is part of evolution that it's not as bad as I think it is. But to me any ability we use to read our environment that is lost, is a shame. Any person who suffers from arthritis will attest that loss of sensation is almost like a phantom pain. 

Our society is suffering from this ability to feel contact. Though there are many trends of ergonomic seating, stand up desks, and special handles, they are already being built with the mindset of losing touch, not retaining it. 

In her book Sensation - the new science of physical intelligence, author Thelma Lobel describes how these moments of physical contact with everyday things, like drinking warm coffee before entering an important job interview, or switching on a light switch can trigger different sensations and spark new ideas and feelings. 

I'm not against moving forward while we make easy tabs available for toy manufacturers, but just being mindful that we also need to be conscious of the "touch free" environments we sometimes crave and create and what it must be doing to our soul. 

Time for Some Retail Therapy

"If you could be any store in the world, what store would you be?"

It's the first questions I ask first time clients when I meet them. Sounds like a silly almost juvenile type of question, right? But the response to this question loads me with so much information about a person's personal design sensibilities. Just the word IKEA evokes immediate visual and sensory reaction from any person -- the light birch color, clean lines, smell of cinnamon baked goods, bright light. 

But in the past few years or so things have shifted, it takes a person longer to respond to that question without being cynical and saying "Amazon". But that too is very telling. Our time has become a valuable commodity and between the hussle of very full and active family lives, and increasingly harder to balance work schedule -- going out shopping is not much fun anymore, where is in the past it was considered therapy. To me it feels like going into a teenagers room wanting to pick up after them.

Yes the economy was hit hard and we are in the odd in-between years of trying to marry good UX online with somewhat of a decent similar experience in brick and mortar storefronts - hey even Amazon is opening one! There is value for people to go out and shop, bump into friends, walk around and engage in different environments, while they consume more useless products. We humans need to have a purpose and meaning even if it's a simple one of getting a bar of soap. Most of us don't have a nice park or open space around us, the streets and shopping plazas become these communal arenas. 

Yet we are greeted with visual cacophony, most of it following "design rules" that pre-date the immediate click-of-the-button-swipe-of the-fingerprint era -- Loud music, harsh smells, disorienting product placements, bright lights, low or no-inventory that can easily be found online, a tired salesperson, long lines to pay or return items. Most of these stores are run down, people who work there are annoyed and tired because of entitled "let's just scan this items" consumers. The whole shopping experience has been reduced to that moment of email confirmation of "your item is on it's way". 

It's no secret these retailers are struggling, closing down stores leaving gaping holes in shopping malls, street plazas, and city centers. Which in turn leave us with almost ghost like places. Retailers have yet to make the adjustment to this new world of shopping experience, it's almost like they are at a loss and have given up completely. Like all of us in these odd and fickle economic times they too need to rethink cost-per-sqft or ROI -- yet we humans are not only the sum of that. And our reaction to the lack of seeing us as human in need of contact, efficient, pleasant places to be and interact in is that of that going online. 

Smaller more humanly accessible stores, where one can see the end of it, where there is some inkling experience that makes us pause, smile and give us a meaningful break in our day will go a long way in improving retailer's bottom line and user experience. I want to go back in time to the feeling of excitement I had at the end of the 90's start of 2000's when I pounded the streets of downtown trying to find the next big WOW moment that was supplied by exciting store designs that even the biggest names in architecture at the time were not ashamed to be part of. 
We all lose when a layer of our needs is taken away, and another human factor is lost into the efficient sterile cyber zone. 

Something in the Way

Life gets in the way. It does. So many times I wish for a bubble to be able to think, or at least manage to put 2 and 2 together, without it becoming 5. 

But then again this bubble utopia I wish and long for does not truly exist, even if it did -- would it make it easier to work in this uninterrupted world? I find that in most cases though, as a tell my active 7y, silence is golden, it's sometimes (ok most times) paralyzing. That the "noise" generated by the things around me, hold in them the true grain of creativity. When I'm presented with a "blank" canvas space, where there is nothing to bounces off thoughts from, is when it really gets tricky. 

The challenge is, most commerical spaces are like that, blank, nothing bouncing off right at me. Which is hard, very hard to come up with a narrative or meaning, if you will, for these spaces. So how does one marry love, passion, and creativity into spaces that obviously need the most attention? It becomes a journey of looking into how to amplify some of the hidden "noises", create meaning.

The average American office interior spaces and their design are almost always neglected, and over the years they have been left at the hands of cost per SQFT demands, business cooperations, market trends, real estate forces, furniture manufacturers, and various management theories - but almost never at the hands of the end user - the "average" office worker.

In his book “The European office” Juriaan van Meel proclaims “Office buildings (...) are perhaps the most important building types of the 20th century… They dominate the contemporary city and accommodate more than half the working population in the Western world”.

That to me is mind blowing information - more than half of the working population in the Western world!!! Which on average spend 47 hours a week in these buildings, which is more hours spent sleeping a week, or almost three times more hours spent with immediate family. 

So whenever I walk into a blank space, I keep that piece of information in the back of my mind, because so much time spent in such neglected spaces affect not only the person using them, but society as a whole, it should get in the way, because life gets in the way.