10 Chapter 10 – Workplace Design

How to Design a Cockpit

In 1950, the United States Air Force was planning to redesign the cockpits of its airplanes. It was clear to the Air Force that jet fighters were the new critical technology, and all components of a jet fighter were being reexamined to make sure that the entire machine was functioning at peak efficiency. They developed a plan for how they would redesign their cockpits. They wanted to make sure that the cockpit would fit the largest number of body shapes possible. After all, fighter pilot is a very difficult job and not just anyone can get the job done. There are body size requirements, cognitive ability requirements, and attitude requirements that all work to limit the pool of potential fighter pilots. Designing a cockpit to fit fewer than the maximum number of people possible did not make sense because it would add even more barriers to an already small applicant pool. So, the plan was to measure the bodies of every pilot that flew into Wright-Patterson Air Force Base over the course of a calendar year. This would amount to more than 4,000 pilots with 140 different measurements taken. These measurements could be standard like height and weight or they could be more complex like arm length, knee circumference, or chest depth. The plan was to then find the 10 most important measurements for cockpit design, average each of those ten measurements, and then design the cockpit around those measurements.

To complete this project, the Air Force designated Lt. Gilbert Daniels. Lt. Daniels studied physical anthropology at Harvard and had written his senior thesis on variability in hand size in the male student body of Harvard College. Very few people read it. However, because he wrote this thesis, he knew how variable the human body could be. His knowledge of human variability led him to an important insight. He knew that averaging the measurements of these 4,000 pilots was the wrong approach. It would not yield a reasonable result. However, he had to figure out a way to convince his superior officers that had authorized this study of this fact.

He decided to stage a contest. He challenged everyone involved in the project to guess how many pilots would be within one standard deviation of the average on the 10 measurements most important for cockpit design. After all, this is essentially the way the project coordinators had decided to solve their design problem. Take all the measurements, design for the average, and then everyone close to that average should be able to fit. Lt. Daniels simply challenged everyone to guess exactly how many of the pilots would fit those criteria. Everyone put in their guesses and then Daniels went through each of the 4,063 records to determine whether a pilot was within one standard deviation on each of the 10 measurements.

No one that put in a guess had the correct answer. Most assumed the vast majority of pilots would fit the average on most of these criteria. They were all incredibly surprised when Lt. Daniels returned with the exact number of pilots that fit the average on all 10 criteria – 0. None of these 4,063 pilots would fit comfortably into the cockpit that the Air Force was planning to design. Which means that the Air Force would essentially be designing a cockpit for no one. Even when Lt. Daniels went back and only looked at the three most important measurements for cockpit design, he still only came up with 140 pilots that were within one standard deviation of the average on all three measurements. This means only 3% of pilots would have a cockpit that fit them in even a basic way.

The lesson that Lt. Daniels’ challenge taught the Air Force is that a cockpit needed to be adjustable to be useful for most pilots. The humans trying to occupy those cockpits would all be intensely different, so the cockpit had to be flexible to fit the maximum number of people. Even though all the measured pilots tended to be slightly shorter than average, muscular, young, and male (this was the Air Force of the 1950’s after all) their bodies were in no way similar to each other. One person might have very short legs, others might have very long arms, others still might have long torsos. The key was to make sure that everyone could make the cockpit fit their individual body instead of forcing bodies to fit the cockpit.

Landscaped Offices

A similar attempt to make bodies fit space that ultimately was deemed unsuccessful were so-called landscaped offices. This type of office design became popular in the 1980’s and 90’s and was an attempt to get everyone in the office talking. Managers and office designers believed that the economic troubles of the late 70’s and early 80’s were in part caused by an inability of office workers to effectively communicate with one another. There was a widespread belief that organizations were unable to change quickly enough to meet the demands of a constantly changing world and economy. However, if internal communication could be increased, change could potentially happen much quicker as everyone would have a better understanding of how everyone within the organization was working to further the organization’s goals.

Enter the landscaped office. This was an office building without typical offices. There would be large, open areas with no floor to ceiling walls. Instead, cubicles would be created with walls about four feet tall made of aluminum beams and covered in carpet. Cubicles would have no doors and could be entered by anyone at any time. Inside the cubicle would be an individual workstation with a desk, computer, and storage areas. Now, if a worker needed to discuss something with another worker, they only need to stand up and look around. They could walk around this space relatively easily and engage their coworkers in any necessary conversation without the barriers of walls and closed doors.

These changes did result in increases in conversation. These open office areas became centers of conversation. The only question was, what were workers talking about? This was a very difficult research question to answer. However, many industrial/organizational psychologists attempted to answer it. And their best answer was that by a 4:1 margin, workers were not talking about anything related to work. Conversation topics included family, current events, what happened on the latest episode of popular television shows, and many others. It’s just that very few conversations were about work.

Unsurprisingly, many workers began to resent the landscaped office. This can be seen in many examples from popular media of the day – from the movie Office Space to the popularity of Dilbert cartoons. Many workers began to resent the constant disruptions and asked for accommodations that would limit the amount of work interruptions they would experience on a day-to-day basis. In some cases, this was as simple as being allowed to wear headphones at work to block out distractions. In a more extreme example, sometimes people would stay in the office to socialize, but when work needed to be done, they would decamp to a coffee shop or other location that did not afford so many distractions. Our modern movement toward work-from-home following the COVID-19 pandemic is just the latest step in this same trend. Evidence shows that workers in work-from-home environments are at least as productive as workers that are in office settings and sometimes much more-so.

Workplace Design

Employees asking for a simple change of being able to listen to music at work to block out distractions was something of a question for management in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Managers didn’t know if allowing workers to listen to music while on shift would create more harm than good. What if the music distracted them more than the interruptions? Research conducted on this very question found that workers having headphone on contributed to a great deal more productivity than without them. Interestingly, it wasn’t the fact that the workers were listening to music that brought about more productivity. Instead, it was the signal that the headphones sent to would-be interrupters. Headphones on were an easy visual signal that the person didn’t want to be interrupted, and so people with nothing work-related to say would avoid people wearing headphones.

This simple research discovery prompted other questions about how offices could be redesigned to improve productivity and other outcomes. However, many of these efforts were not as research based. Many people wanted quick, cheap solutions to workplace design problems and found their answers in less reputable studies about how the color of the walls can change people’s moods. The most famous example of this is when the University of Iowa football program saw that their visitor’s locker room needed a fresh coat of paint. Relying on studies that said pink rooms create a calming, less aggressive atmosphere, they chose to paint the visitor’s locker room a light, pastel pink. It should be made abundantly clear that the color of paint on the walls of a room has almost no impact on people’s moods – at least in the aggregate. There is not a color that will impact most people’s emotional state in the same way.

Human Factors

This ultimately leads us to a question of what does impact performance on a variety of work tasks? This is a question for the field of Human Factors. Broadly speaking, Human Factors as a field refers to designing with people in mind. This might refer to spaces, objects, or transactions. But the sense is always that designers consider human abilities, goals, and motivations when designing those things that humans interact with.

Humans have a general ability driven from our perceptual systems that allows us to innately understand what objects could be used for. These inherent uses are referred to as affordances. Affordances do not have to be designed intentionally.  A designer may design a retaining wall with the sole purpose of keeping dirt up and away from a sidewalk without it causing a slide. However, people might see your retaining wall and note that it is an object with a flat top surface that is 18 inches off the ground and thus will afford sitting. Or maybe a tired person will see that your retaining wall afford sleeping. Or a skateboarder may note that your retaining wall affords slide tricks. A designer always needs to keep the idea of affordances in the back of their mind. Because one must always remember what types of tasks are being conducted in a place, both official and unofficial, and recognize that people will likely want to continue doing these things even if the space is redesigned.

Lt. Daniels was an early adopter of human factors in an official design capacity. He advocated for a philosophy that designed for the people that would be in the cockpit rather than a mythical “average” person that never existed except in calculation. As a result of his efforts, all piloted military aircraft have highly customizable cockpits. Seats will slide forward and backward, rudder pedals will move toward or away from the feet, control sticks will move up and down, all to accommodate the different body shapes that inhabit the aircraft. Similarly, modern offices are beginning to design in a way that accommodates different workers and their different roles. Modern offices are providing some open spaces for workers that want that socialization and are energized by it while also providing some private working space to accommodate those that need private spaces to be productive. Modern design of work spaces is embracing designing for human variability as the next attempt to design the space that fits the most people in the best way.

Summary

Workplace design can be considered from multiple perspectives. One could think about the spaces that workers inhabit as well as the equipment they must work with. In both cases, designers are embracing a philosophy of accepting variability and allowing both spaces and objects to be customized to fit someone in an effective way.