Tuesday 29 May 2012

Workplace Philosophy

In Alain De Botton's book "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" he talks about changing attitudes towards work.
In Aristotle's time he believed that work was for slaves and animals and that the only way to live a higher level of life was not to work and to spend time on leisure activities such as enjoying music and literature.
Later Diderot and D'Alembert described how only true life satisfaction can come from earning a living and that work and productivity will give a person pride in their achievements which leads to a much richer life than a life of leisure and self indulgence.
I have tried to show these two attitudes manifested in different work ethics of 1) The Boss 2) The Employee and 3) The General Attitude.


*Edit: Updated diagram here

Thursday 24 May 2012

Survey Results So Far

Here are the results to my survey so far. I've had 21 people complete it and have picked 9 to concentrate on here to show the variety in needs between the different office types.
I hope that this diagram will make it easy to quickly see the types of spaces needed for the different types of office spaces.
The idea is that companies would list all the types of spaces they need and number them in a similar way to show how important they are. In this way I, as the designer, can decide how to allocate space.

Wednesday 23 May 2012

Final Stage: Office Areas Survey

To start the final stage of the MA I made a new survey to find out what kinds of areas within an office space are most important to different professions. The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QW8C2SM
I hope to make a diagram like the one below to show the importance of each space to each type of company.
I hope that in this way the results will be visual and easily read. I will also make a pie chart or cumulative bar chart for each to show how important each is as a fraction of the whole.