All the warnings of pre-pandemic researchers about open plan offices have of course come home to roost. The article below links to a new edition of a much awarded book by Joseph G. Allen and John D. Macomber titled Healthy Buildings first published in 2020 and updated in October 2022 with additional research conducted during …
Just posting this here for future reference. The feeling of place has been a subject of long fascination for me and I particularly like the situationist notion of drifting through and paying attention to the subtle shifts in feeling of urban and other landscapes – the notion of dérive. Here’s Guy Debord on the subject: …
Five years ago, I put together a research paper on the problems of open plan offices in universities. These problems were by no means limited to the higher education sector but were evident across multiple industries. One of the points I raised related to the dangers of disease transmission. Of course, this is now a …
I am fascinated by various kinds of literary and artistic maps. This article in The Guardian talks about some notable literary maps: Robert Macfarlane, Frances Hardinge and Miraphora Mina, Wizards, Moomins and pirates: the magic and mystery of literary maps, The Guardian, 22 Sep 2018 From Moominland to the Marauder’s Map, writers Robert Macfarlane, Frances …
A new study conducted by Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban with yet more confirmation of the problems with open plan office space is currently attracting wide attention in the media and on the web. Of course, the study does no more than confirm what has already been argued at length elsewhere and what workers …
I am a big fan of artistic maps, not necessarily applied to actual geographical areas. Perhaps we could call these heterotopian maps. This lovely map which has recently been doing the rounds on twitter and facebook was designed by Gemma Correll for Evernote. Update 5 April 2019 A couple of really good articles on procrastination. …
More reflections prompted by: Clare Cooper Marcus, House as a mirror of self. Exploring the deeper meaning of home, Lake Worth, Nicolas Hays, 2006 [1995]. To add to my miscellany of definitions of home, Cooper Marcus (pp. 105-6) refers to a 1979 work by David Seamon with a strong Heideggerian theme, A geography of the lifeworld. …
Originally posted on crosspollenblog:
This post takes off from reflections on two notebook entries in Walter Benjamin’s long, uncompleted research into the space and culture of 19th-century Paris, The Arcades Project or Passagenwerk, notes that he dedicated to the problem of dwelling (Wohnen). I’ll come back to these soon. But first a few preliminaries to…
Design Psychology, ‘the practice of architecture, planning and interior design in which psychology is the principal design tool’ (Toby Israel) is a growing new field, forming part of the discipline of psychology’s ever expanding and dubious endeavour to encompass and explain all human experience. Clare Cooper Marcus’s work could also be situated within this movement. …
Often the notion of home and living space are conflated, but they are by no means the same thing. ‘Home’ is paradoxically an utterly ambiguous and floating notion. Is it one’s designated ‘place of residence’, the parents’ home or place of origin, the nation state where one currently lives or was located in the past? …
Refracted Input 