3 minute read
02. Assessing Your Needs
from Working LandScapes
by Perkins&Will
Landscape designers know by trade how to navigate the relationship between people and the natural environment. Our Landscape Architecture team excels at guiding that relationship by elevating performance, productivity, and well-being for our clients in the spaces and communities they seek to build.
In the following pages, we break down the factors to consider as you think about taking your work and learning environments outside. In a pandemic, consideration has to start with Health & Safety. Once those parameters are set, then Personal Comfort and Infrastructure can inform your choices. Finally, questions of Investment & Operations will inform the design of your WorkScape, addressing the issues of permanence, flexibility, and ongoing maintenance.
—New York Times, July 3, 20208
PANDEMIC GUIDELINES SECURITY PRIVACY
Health & Safety
Health & Safety are paramount considerations whether we are fighting a pandemic or not. However, the public health dimension of containing the coronavirus dictates the need for clearly defined circulation and protective barriers, from masks and sanitized surfaces to safe distances and physical boundaries. When pandemic restrictions are eventually lifted, securing personal space and belongings as well as the privacy of one's activity will return to being baseline design considerations.
• Adhering to pandemic guidelines • Securing personal space • Managing boundaries
WIND PRECIPITATION GLARE TEMPERATURE
Comfort & Productivity
Once the Health & Safety baseline has been established, outdoor activity quickly becomes a matter of Personal Comfort. Outdoor work spaces need to minimize environmental distractions whether they are predictable, like sun and heat, or sudden, like rain and wind. The unpredictability of the environment means that outdoor work spaces also need to be movable and operable: one needs to be able to adjust and position the site furnishings to support attention on the solitary or group task at hand.
• Minimizing disturbance • Promoting productivity • Adapting to the environment • Anticipating screen use
WI-FI LIGHTING ERGONOMICS POWER
Infrastructure
The underlying Infrastructure that makes outside work and learning environments possible also factors into making the outdoor experience cohesive and inspiring. Here is where design expertise and creative problem solving assume their most critical role, in orchestrating the built and natural systems into a social system that advances individual and organizational goals. When outdoor work or learning environments are effortlessly healthy, safe, comfortable, and productive, they enrich the quality of the activity once limited to inside spaces.
COST MAINTENANCE
Investment & Operations
Adapting to the pandemic will entail weighing the cost of short-term fixes against the projected value of investment in long-term solutions with ongoing costs. If 10 percent of an operating budget goes to the creation and maintenance of the environment that supports and inspires the people working in it—i.e., the other 90 percent—then even modest investment is justified by the returns. The biophilic design movement is rooted in the bottom-line value of access to nature and organic forms.9
• Connecting to networks • Regulating the environment • Supporting technology • Illuminating spaces and paths • Calculating value • Keeping it all running • Maintaining value
Innovative Design
Practical considerations are the first step in taking indoor working and learning environments outside. To be truly successful, however, the spaces must be dynamic and inviting to engage users in both pandemic and nonpandemic times.
Creative and Inspiring
• Bold Forms
• Socially Magnetic
• Instagram Moments
Flexible and Adaptive
Connected and Engaging
