An Interview With Ben Ari
Hybrid work has also shown that people want to go to an office that’s in a place that supports the employees in ways other than just work. So we should think of office design extending to a thoughtful context. This is relatively easy when the office is in a city downtown because the city supports easy access through public transportation, restaurants, local gyms, outdoor space and parks, etc. which become extensions of the interior of the workplace.
As a part of our series called “How To Design Office Spaces That People Love To Work In”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Sullivan.
Dan Sullivan’s passion is the built environment centered around the belief that there is no greater way to improve the life of humans, than through the spaces they inhabit. He believes that data-and research-driven initiatives are key to driving impact, and that beauty makes those solutions transcendent. He also knows that the best designs are implemented, adopted and scaled for real impact.
Thank you so much for joining us in this series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I am professionally trained in architecture and have practiced in what would be referred to as “traditional architecture” — designing one-off buildings for clients with substantial means (individuals, governments, museums, etc.). I’ve helped to develop unique, innovative solutions for single buildings and single projects. While this was satisfying, I longed to have a greater impact on the industry as a whole and to extend innovations to the building industry at large. I knew that the power of the built environment could be further realized if we leveraged emerging technologies in construction as well as research in human health and wellness. At that point, I shifted from a building design focus to a research and development focus for the built environment. To me, innovating around building systems, material strategies, and process improvements (as opposed to singular structures) enables the built environment to respond better to humans at a pace that more closely reflects how we live– and this has become my personal and professional mission to make these principles accessible to every player of the industry.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?
When thinking about the totality of what I’ve done within the built environment so far, some of the most interesting work that I’ve completed has been in creating large-scale art — especially at Burning Man. In particular, one project that I designed and led was the Catacomb of Veils — a project which was 100’ tall, 400’ feet across with a footprint of half an acre. The project was to be built in the remote Nevada Desert with an all volunteer labor force in ten days. While this project was, from a technical perspective, an exercise in off-site modular construction for the pre-build, it was more an exercise in humans building together, achieving otherwise impossible ends through connection and community– enabled by construction technology.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have a strong belief that we create our reality. The things we do, say and think ARE our experience. So, when I start a day, there’s not a lot of uncertainty. I know how the day will be based on the frame of mind I go into it with. The general chaos of the world, of course, will throw you some curveballs, but it’s a choice to be resilient in the face of those challenges.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?
We’re currently partnering with a few companies who are expanding rapidly, despite the contraction of the real estate market elsewhere. It’s really interesting to watch them take “uncertainty” as a design principle– recognizing how real estate has hampered agility in the past and consider it as a main driver for creating resilient portfolios.
Thank you for that. Here is the main question of our discussion. What are your “Five Things You Should Do To Design Office Spaces That People Love To Work In” and why.
1. Provide for the Functions of the Work: Focus
The office workplace fundamentally needs to support the core business financial and mission objectives. That means that employees should feel fully supported to deliver on their professional remits, particularly with respect to providing workspace for focus and flow
With the move to a hybrid work model, where certain days are worked from home and some at the physical office, the need for space to support focus work has also evolved. Many employees report that their work at home is where they carve out heads down work time, also in the context of managing their own life schedules. However, we know from productivity analyses that these employees are self-reporting higher productivity, but are not actually more productive in a metric sense. We know that the home is loaded with distractions– kids, pets, laundry, cleaning, etc. as well as mundane tasks that can be used as distraction techniques when work becomes challenging.
The physical office can offer a remedy to this in providing true distraction free workspace. A place that a person can go to that supports and enables focus. This starts with acoustic privacy and with that, the old model of the open plan office is rendered obsolete. We know that these open spaces enable connections of certain kinds, but they also allow the free flow of conversations and unwanted sounds to permeate other peoples work spaces. So a more cellularized plan is desired with high performing acoustical partitioning of space that is designed to support heads down focus.
2. Provide for the functions of the Work: Collaboration
We also understand from research on hybrid work, that digital collaboration tools such as video conferencing and collaborative white boards, have not advanced to the point where most people feel like they are truly collaborating or building the camaraderie and trust necessary to deliver team-based work.
To remedy this our spaces need to provide for in-person collaboration and to enable the kinds of interactions that build trust in teams. For Collaboration spaces, it is important to provide a variety of spaces ranging from the formal to the informal. Formal conference room spaces are organized around a central table and are an important set-up for presentations, financial meetings, operational meetings, board meetings, and other meetings that follow a more traditional script.
For creative meetings, like marketing, product design, the formal arrangements are less effective. First, in a formal setting people tend to hide behind their laptops. In a creative situation you want to remove barriers– physical and psychological to create a sense of vulnerability and connection. Arrangements that work for this are typically not in 4 sided rooms and rarely have a central table. These spaces are lounges, picnic tables, and outdoor grassy knolls.
Finally for emotionally charged meetings, it’s important to provide highly private spaces for hard 1:1 conversations. These enable Human Resources conversations, mentor conversations, and allow for the integration of personal lives in the work environment, for generating more trust and support in teams.
3: Be the Place People Want to Go To
Hybrid work has also shown that people want to go to an office that’s in a place that supports the employees in ways other than just work. So we should think of office design extending to a thoughtful context. This is relatively easy when the office is in a city downtown because the city supports easy access through public transportation, restaurants, local gyms, outdoor space and parks, etc. which become extensions of the interior of the workplace.
It becomes harder when a campus is separated from a city center. Companies like Meta and Google learned this early on, that the cost of offering a comprehensive suite of amenities including meals, gyms and private transportation to the places people live ballooned the cost of headcount. From an employee experience perspective, some would argue that these amenities only simulate the experience of a vibrant campus context without any of the authentic extra-company interactions that happen with non-employees in a typical city context, leading to highly insular experiences for the employee.
4. Design for the Brain: Neuroaesthetics
Design practices have advanced dramatically as a result of scientific research into the neurological and physiological responses of the body as a result of the experience of space. In particular NeuroArchitecture, a branch of Neuroaesthetics, has given us additional tools to design to achieve the results that we desire. As an example, if we were designing a space for focus and flow, we’d obviously begin by trying to provide a space that’s free of visual and acoustic distractions and we’d probably do that by managing adjacencies within the layout. But beyond that you might also look at:
- Acoustics: From an acoustic perspective, you might pump in some brown noise to mask conversation, and we know brown noise has helped ADHD patients with focus in a lab setting. Specifically, sound in the range of 50–70dB is acceptable as long as adjacent conversations are not intelligible.
- Lighting: Because of the particular loss of temporality with Flow, you don’t necessarily want natural light. Or you want natural light that is mediated to have a more constant quality. A color temperature of about 3000K is correlated with higher states of creativity. Also helpful here is to enable agency for the individual to change the light levels or color temperature as they see fit.
- Restorative Aspects: you want some connection to nature since nature can be restorative. It’s the visual complexity of nature that enables the restorative effect– an opportunity to relax the eyes and the brain between pushes.
- Materials shouldn’t have to incorporate a variety of patterns aside from those found in the natural surroundings. Also sharper edged patterns can trigger cortisol release since the brain can see it as a threat, so using softer edges is desired. Finally, artwork and in particular paintings can be highly subjective in their ability to create activation or ease and so should be left to collective or circulation areas.
- Body Orientation in space: Flow states depend on psychological safety, and humans hate being approached from the rear. So creating the space in a place where the person can see the entry or has an even larger overall view of the space can create this sense of control over the environment. Also here would be the quality of a more enclosed space. This all speaks to a human need for refuge.
- Transition: Also important here is the ritual of transition– having moved from one activity state to another, so providing a spatial demarcation of transition is also important. This could be a narrowing of a corridor, a physical reorientation of the body.
5. Design for Flexibility:
Finally and most importantly, all of the above strategies should be implemented with the knowledge that human and employees needs and preferences, and the strategies we use to address them will change– and likely sooner than we think. It was just three years ago that a pandemic upended our office practices, and it wasn’t long before that, that cubicles littered office floors, and not long before that that male executive offices lined the windows of offices with their female secretaries at the center of the floor plate.
Armed with this attitude toward evolution, we should construct offices with products and processes that enable the spaces to evolve along with the humans in a way that doesn’t create staggering waste. That means the cores and shells of buildings should be designed for disassembly, with the ability to reconfigure, or with highly flexible long span structures that enable the interiors to reconfigure within them. Interior construction systems should be designed similarly so that building systems can be changed out as technologies change, and the interior partitions should be able to reconfigure over the course of a week with minimal waste.
This flexibility ensures that the space we built today can continue to serve humans, with low resource investment, making us all better at what we do and how we live.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If I could start a movement, it would be that the industry stops designing for disposal. Think of a world where landfills are no longer needed for products or materials. This is exactly the mission behind KOVA: designing with circularity in mind from the start. As an industry, we have to move away from this idea of building new properties and then throwing everything away five years down the road — it’s not a sustainable means to subscribe to this world. If we ALWAYS design to reuse, repurpose, recycle, it would be a movement for the greater good.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Website: https://kovaproducts.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kovaproducts/?hl=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kovaproducts/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational!
Dan Sullivan Of KOVA On How To Design Office Spaces That People Love To Work In was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.