-- Intro –
Chris Moriarty
Hello and welcome to Workplace Geeks your regular deep dive into the world of wonderful workplace academia, and the brilliant brains behind it. I'm Chris Moriarty.
Ian Ellison
And I'm in Ellison.
Chris Moriarty
and we are but your humble guides on this voyage of discovery as we unpick the nuances of workplace performance one study at a time. But before we what you're about to say, we're about to say something…
Ian Ellison
I wasn’t going to say anything, I’m
Chris Moriarty
Is that you're thinking noise
Ian Ellison
I was reading, I was reading.
Chris Moriarty
Before we dive into that, we'd like to firstly apologise for the slight delay since our last episode, which is with Kirsten Sailer, which, incidentally, was the fastest download episode we've ever had. So more on that in a moment. So, the delay, mainly because Ian and I have been out and about at various industry events, as well as our own Audiem event last month. So there has been a lot to juggle but we're back. And we're back on track. It was however lovely to speak to you all. And we got some lovely feedback about the show and about a lovely purple Workplace Geeks notebooks. If you want one of those notebooks, why don't you leave us some feedback about the episode you're about to hear on LinkedIn. And perhaps we'll send you one in the post. Let's see what happens.
Now. I said there was a great response to Kerstin's episode, Ian perhaps you can treat us to a few of those comments that we've received off the back of that.
Ian Ellison
Yeah, absolutely. Chris, and we got such a lovely response and actually also a very international response this time. So for example, Daniel Davies from Hassel based we think in New York great podcast with Dr. Kirsten Sailer talking about how workplace layouts affect the people that use them. And particularly, I think, a thumbs up from Daniel on the getting past the open plan versus cellular very binary discussion, that tends to happen. We've got Dermot McMeel, who's involved with Creative Technologies at the School of Future Environments over in New Zealand. And what Dermot says is what I took away from this great podcast about workplace and social science is just how many ways there are to systematically quantify and analyse the workplace regarding people's experience and productivity. So that's amazing. And I think Dermot might be a bit of a closet space syntax fan. So he likes the fact that that's kind of coming back into the narrative. And then of course, we have Simon Iatrou, our ponder some guest from Canada series. Amazing that Simon was also building his app on LinkedIn.
Chris Moriarty
And that's a lovely moment for our regular reminder to get in touch with us about your thoughts wherever you are in the world about each episode. The easiest and most popular way to do that is on LinkedIn. So just search for Workplace Geeks, you can use their Workplace Geeks hashtag that's #workplacegeeks. Or of course, you can drop us an email on hello@workplacegeeks.org . Or you can sign up to our newsletter, which has all the information about upcoming episodes events that we're going to be at. And you can find out more about that at workplacegeeks.org. Now, just before we dive in today's episode, the last bit of admin, our search for Ben Waber. Now, those that have been listening will know that I was determined to use the podcast to find Ben rather than just, you know, regular forms of communication. And guess what, we've managed to get in touch. So we've had a conversation with Ben, we've even scheduled our chat to look at his wonderful work..
Ian Ellison
The power of the pod
Chris Moriarty
The power of the pod, the pod worked, the community delivered. So for everyone that helps us with that. Thank you very much. Now, enough of that onto today, Ian, tell us a bit more about what the people are about to hear.
Ian Ellison
So today, Chris, we are speaking to Josh Artus who is co-founder and director at the Centric Lab. Now whilst I don't normally like to just repeat stuff from LinkedIn to introduce guests, I love the way that Josh frames it. So his work at the Centric Lab is about focusing on systems of power within urbanisation and built environments, and how these lead to health outcomes. And as we're about to discover, neuroscience plays a significant role in the work at the Centric Lab as well. Now, what should be clear from this kind of narrative from this kind of framing is that the Centric Lab are all about making things better, and words like dignity and justice and equality, they feature a lot in today's conversation. So the piece of work that frames our conversation today is a British Council for Offices project published last year, May 2022. It's called ‘Designing for Neurodiversity’ and the Centric Lab where the lead authors in conjunction with PLP Architecture and the project was sponsored by CBRE, Deloitte and IQL Stratford. You can download the report from the BCO website. It's free. The link as always is going to be in the show notes and it really is a cracking piece of work. But one last thing we decided that since we didn't know enough about neurodiversity, there's a good chance that we could do some Workplace Geeks learning together. So we've made this a double bill. In the next episode, Dr. Joe Yarker returns talk more about neurodiversity from a quite different academic perspective. So stay tuned for that.
Chris Moriarty
As Ian mentioned, we're effectively doing an episode doubleheader, so there will not be a usual reflection section after this conversation. We're going to save that up for the next episode, the second installment in our two parter on neurodiversity. And for that, I'm delighted to say, we'll be joined by a friend of the show, Esme Banks Marr of BVN Architecture, who will be reflected on both Jo and Josh's episode. So that’s enough chuntering. Josh Artus.
-- Interview --
Chris Moriarty
Josh, welcome to the Workplace Geeks podcast. Before we get going, could you just give us a bit of background about the work you do, and I guess your career thus far
Josh Artus
So I'm the urban and built environment lead at Centric Lab. We've been going since 2017. And our research lab uses neuroscience and environmental data to identify how biological inequity contributes to poor health outcomes. But what we end up doing is we use this research to build open access community tools, create new narratives and framings of health. And we provide organisations with expertise and insights on health and place.
My story coming to this is quite an interesting journey. I actually went to art school. And I think I was probably when I was about 15 years old, I thought I wanted to be an architect and then I found out was seven years University and the rebel in me was like, no way man not going to do that. And I ended up at University studying fine art sculpture, which my dad liked to call conceptual DIY.
And I then chose to graduate in the summer of 2008 went on holiday came back and all of a sudden the world had collapsed under the global financial crisis, made my way into working into what's called the location sector, in how film shoots/photo shoots events in the life of renting homes, warehouses, office buildings, the gaps in between commercial real estate deals, basically, where creativity seems to thrive in urban settings, and then had an opportunity and I went to become the first employee kind of part of the founding team of a startup called Appear Here, who was going very well international. And then left, the company did a little bit of stuff. And then 2017 set up Centric Lab having met Araceli, who's a neuroscientist, believing that there was a great way to bring an emerging science, and what I mean by emerging is its relevance to the built environment, bring the data and insights and the methods out of the lab into practice. And we've been on quite a bit of a whirlwind journey itself, understanding our place and purpose in the kind of wider marketplace.
Chris Moriarty
That Centric Lab origin story sounds quite interesting. Because I guess, in a way, it kind of parallels some of the stuff that we talked about on here, which is there is a lot of work done in circumstances and environments that aren't real. We can look at science and test stuff and look at all that sort of stuff, but is kind of done in a synthetic environment. And it sounds like what you guys are trying to do is bridge that gap between scientific knowledge in those sort of sterile environments where everything can be controlled, and drop it into the chaos of the real world.
Josh Artus
Yeah, and I think it was a big lesson for us. We saw our place not as trying to replicate work that's happening within academia, but take a better and a more holistic understanding of the urban experience.
Ian Ellison
That kind of explains why you take an ecological perspective to the piece of work that we're going to talk about in a moment, Josh, but just for the uninformed listener, I've heard so far that Centric Lab is about exploring from a neuroscience perspective, their interrelationship between people and their environments. And those environments might be urban, they might be city scale, or equally, they might be kind of office or building scale, but just sort of just simplify it a little bit and just talk to me a little bit about the relationship if that's all right.
Josh Artus
So straight out, we wouldn't be anywhere where we are without the forsight of Professor Xavier Golyay, who I think has since left UCL. We also wouldn't be where we are without Professor Hugo-Spiers, who is a professor in spatial navigation at University College London. And the same with Professor Nick Tyler, who he calls himself a civilised engineer, and is one of the Chadwick Professors at UCL in the engineering and transport and is the leader of a facility called Pearl, which is this fantastic environment way out in Dagenham. It started at a very chance meeting, as Araceli who used to run a co-working space that was set up in 2009. And we kind of did the previous history and it was the kind of about the third space to open in London to the point where co-working didn't exist as a terminology and it was kind of called a conceptual workspace and but through that one of the members Bostian. He is one of his friends and contacts from his original homeland of Slovenia was this professors of Xavier Golay. And he met Araceli. And they started to talk at one of these dinners that the Cube which was the co working space error telegram. They were having this conversation she was saying, I'm a neuroscientist. I've been studying cognition. I've specialism in autism, and really interested in how this matters to people, cities and quality of life. And I think about starting a lab. And he was like, well, let me try and set you up with this grant. Because we've got a professor at UCL, I think you might know, Professor Hugo-Spiers, and she was like, oh, yeah, we've just actually done a conference with him, which was actually hosted at Arup, alongside the Museum of Architecture. And so the contacts got put together. And Hugo was like, this is a great idea. I'm really interested in taking the science out of the lab into the built environment. And Hugo still does this.
So we've kept our relationship with UCL because obviously, we wouldn't be anywhere where without them, kind of answers how we kind of came about, which is really creating your own serendipity. And it really sounds really contrived. But that kind of was the whole point of those kinds of conceptual workspaces was to bring those people together and went on this journey of opportunity, then heavy research and understanding how to build this relationship over a period of time with an academic institution and improve those dialogues to and fro.
Chris Moriarty
We want to talk to you today then about a very specific paper. So this is the designing for neurodiversity paper, it was done through the BCO. So before we dive into what was in the paper, how did this come about? What was the objective? And how did it come together?
Josh Artus
Design Neurodiversity was a project commissioned by the British Council for Offices. And I just want to give a really important early shout out to Carl Brooks of CBRE, who was integral to our connection with the BCO. We first interacted with Carl, when he was at a previous company, big interested in environmental psychology, which was a part of his sort of graduate program work that he was doing and always stayed with him. And a big shout out to Arezou Said, who was just a fantastic person to work with at the British Council for Offices.
But the way that we looked at this was the research sort of led report and playbook was designed to equip those who are creating the workplaces with principals, insights and recommendations needed to make employment for people who are neurodivergent more equitable, and dignifying, and that was the foundation of the work. Everything kind of sits on top of that. There are three core points to the piece, the role that officers play in society, the idea of equitable access to employment, and the health of those in the neurodiversity community.
And the whole point report was about how to frame the future of work as an equitable access to enabling work environments. And enabling work environment is one that supports the mental, social, psychological and physical health of those inhabiting the space. So to anchor this research, we used neuroscience and epidemiology, along with a whole range of lived experience based interviews, to help us understand define the relationship between humans and the places they inhabit.
It was organised so that companies have effective the ability to kind of just as they have branding guidelines. So we know the very fancy office developers like to use certain fonts, for example. And there's certain lighting features that they have as a branding guideline that they would like to see replicated as the space becomes branded. Well, we created a playbook so that it was full of insights and recommendations that organisations could jump in, whether it's at a what we call a place a building, or even a space base level. So, they can bring those recommendations and insights at those different scales, and put them into their own guidelines, so that their own sort of studio practice or branding practice, if they are a large developer, or an investor, or a consultant as well can bring that information. So, the aim was really to provide a playbook that allowed people to access the different information at different scales and incorporate it into their own practices.
Ian Ellison
First and foremost, Josh, it's a really fascinating read, you talked about it being accessible at different levels. And I kind of felt that because I can see the practical guidance side of it, which kind of comes later, actually. But it's also educational, in that it fundamentally explained some of the physiological mechanisms. And I think that's the right word to use. It helps understand why people who are neurodiverse or who identify as neurodiverse, because of a particular medical condition, experience things in a way that, well you frame it around the stress response, as the mechanism for why it is harder, which I found incredibly enlightening. It actually caught me off guard and I don't know whether that's because I wasn't expecting to see it in a sort of BCO style publication. But I see it as a political statement. And I'm not trying to set this up to be contentious or political, but I'm fascinated but you're The opening salvo is that neurodiversity is a movement, and a community that advocates for equitable inclusion in all aspects of society, including employment, and you link employment to office space through the mechanism of health and well-being in the workplace. And that sort of opening political position, about identification, about the responsibility for us as providers of space. And you talk about the whole industry, and you sort of call out the different areas. It's educational, but it's also aspirational. And I thought that was just quite stunning, actually, for what is essentially a guidance document. Right.
Josh Artus
I think this is one of the great things about working with the BCO is they believed in that platform too. And I think that was great to work with them. So you got to give kudos to those who champion progression. I think it's important to note, that's not necessarily our declaration. So neurodiversity is an umbrella term that was coined by Judy Singer, to represent the diversity of all of our sort of cognitive functions. And so that's where the term, so it's always been identified as a movement, a form of social inclusion. I think one of the challenges is when non or sort of neurotypical, as the inverse gets called, have chosen to create labels. And unfortunately, in many corners of our society, there is a need to create a label to create a separation and understand another person. There are horrible instances of colonial based racism in which we've chosen to create race and racism on top of that, and unfortunately, that hangover of putting a label on someone and creating a stereotype around them continued. And so one of the things that we wanted to do was to try and unbreak that pseudo myth that we see in for example, television and film media, like the film Rain Man, and how that portrayed a stereotype and it's just it's just unfair and and unjust in many ways. So yet, neurodiversity is a movement that advocates for equitable inclusion in all aspects of society, including employments and, you know, a person cannot be diagnosed with neurodiversity. Instead, it's an identifier they choose to use, and many who identify as neurodiverse had been diagnosed with a specific conditions such as autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette syndrome, and other diagnosis that includes a variation in how a person socialises learns and attunes to their surroundings, which is one of the big things about this, this piece of work but also regulates their mood, and how they move through an environment and process and sort of information. And also, it's important, noting for kind of comorbidity side of things that neurodiversity is also has a link to disability. And so you know, as some on the autistic spectrum may experience other learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, so there's these overlappings that we need to be conscious of, and everything. The main thing is, the principle of neurodiversity in this movement is that it is intended to not have the pathology of the condition that causes barriers to society and inclusion or causes a disability rather, it is the socio cultural architecture of a society that is only equipped to support a small range of variability. ie it is not the person that has a problem is the system in which that person operates in. And there's an akin and a likeness to the Disability Justice Movement, who for decades have been examining disability and ableism, as they relate to other forms of oppression and identity such as race, class, and gender. And so, you know, the work of disability advocates has led to numerous positive policy interventions, such as we see in the built environment and building regulations and design functions. And as you know, Carl Brooks, who I mentioned before, those, who as CBRE were one of the sponsors of this report in a briefing session said, what's the ramp for mental health? And in particular, how do we understand that for people who are neurodivergent, and I think we have to be more acute and accurate in how we are being equal to people and treating with equity in the process. I have a big personal relationship to this work. So my younger brother Isaac, identifies as neurodivergent. And that's the important thing. Neurodiversity is the movement but people identify as neurodivergent. So personally, as we've built on this work, there is a big importance to really delivering justice, because I know what it's like to someone when you see them suffer in spaces that are disorientating and disabling to them.
Chris Moriarty
I think that's probably the thing about this paper that I enjoyed the most, which is I kind of saw it in parts, I don’t think that’s a great revelation, it’s quite obviously in parts that you described at the top of the interview that. It kind of set the scene. It kind of help the reader understand what we're talking about, because there's a lot of misinformation and it's interesting that you mentioned Rain Man, because there were two names I wrote down, there’s a part of the paper that talks about stereotypes and that was Rain Man. And I will show you I also write down Richard Branson, because he came out. And I think kind of innocently tried to positively influence the debate. But it kind of sounded like what he was saying is, we're missing out on a lot of people like Rain Man that can come in and help our organisation, it almost think actually, because he was talking about a big load of skills and talent that we were missing out on. And actually, that made me, it reminded me of what you were talking about the paper about what you the paper was talking about. But it shouldn't be seen as a competitive advantage as a productivity gain type thing. Everyone should have access to work and because work leads to livelihood and livelihood leads to better health sort of thing.
Josh Artus
So I'll put it as a kind of reverse proposition question. Is it that certain people who identify as neurodivergent are good at certain skill sets? Or is it from a young age that they have had to seek other methods, other activities and other places and social dynamics in which they have undeniably advanced or become experts at then they have been forced into an area and then in some cases flourished, rather than an innateness to have flourished in anything in that way? I hope I articulated that, right. But we kind of,
Ian Ellison
It's interesting, because hearing you talk, Josh, you are a very eloquent chap in the way you articulate stuff, but your passion and your knowledge and your I'm gonna say activism, because you said it's not political report, right. But we bring ourselves to the work that we do, right, we choose to be invested in certain things, because that's what we stand for. Right.
So let's just take stock quickly of how you went about the report just because, you know, the document stands by itself. It's informative, it's educational, it's motivational, it's inspiring, for lots of different reasons. You were commissioned by BCO to do a project. And from what I can gather, it involved literature reviewing involves interviews with both experts and people who identified as neuro diverse and potentially other folk, people who were neuro diverse or identified as neuro diverse, were involved in the production of it, which is quite interesting in terms of inclusiveness, and perspectives and mountaintops. And you also had roundtables for validation and for further learning. So this, to me is a sort of a classic, qualitative mixed methods piece of work. Did you already, as you approached BCO to do this piece of work for them, have an idea of what the output needed to be? or to what extent did the journey of researching inform what the output ended up as?
Josh Artus
Yeah, so I think on a, I want to bring out a quick shout out that we were the lead authors, but very much supported by PLP Architecture. We…
Ian Ellison
Ronn Bakker and crew
Josh Artus
Ron crew member and Alex Davidson. And we knew Halle very well before she left the PLP to go work elsewhere. So they supported us in ensuring this project was wrapping around well, very much in the sort of design functions and requirements. And that's evident in some of the recommendations and the moves towards legislation and how we've looked at certain things. But I think it goes, it's true to all research that Centric Lab does, which is focusing on centering the lived experience to ensure that any sort of research narratives are accurate, and obviously, massive caveat, you interview 10 people that is not symptomatic of the entire world. So you have to make sure that your approaches to those questions and the conclusions that you're drawing from insights are not sort of dogma, but they are supporting a loose trajectory that you already kind of know. You know, we've been hyper aware of the limitations in some of the literature that's out there from the design sector about neurodiversity as a movement. So we made sure and we wanted to do our best to make sure that is what we're trying to dispel. And so knowing that that had to be translated into two sort of design parameters, we already had a journey that sort of go on, but we knew the science and how we were going to evaluate and provide the measuring stick in why everything from sensorial activities to sort of culture and place management, as well as what it's like to try and travel to a work building, how we could anchor that around a one scientific phenomena that was easy for people to sort of conceptualise, and that's where we knew that by focusing our work and as our lab does around the stress response system, we could provide a very straightforward but deep scientific explanation.
So not only do we have the rhetoric, set up the narrative, we knew the scientific approach, but we also knew the areas and elements that we were going to edit. As the interviews developed and our internal roundtables kind of went forward, what became more acute were the types of recommendations. And I think, no better than to give a shout out to Luke Ward, who is now a designer at Gensler. And he was a designer looking at experience. And he is someone who identifies as neurodivergent. He doesn't necessarily do design for neurodivergent people…
Ian Ellison
but it's in his fabric. Yeah, it's in his fabric, right? He brings himself to it, which informs the project.
Josh Artus
By default, yes, but he's not walking around with a badge saying, I'm a neurodiversity designer, that's because he's a designer, but he can just do work in a variety of ways. He just has a way of approaching a certain situation and going, by the way, we should, let's do this, let's not do that, then maybe he doesn't, it's just in intuitively, in his work as an example. But again, you know, he's not living by a stereotype.
And I think working with him and spending more time and looking at the recommendations, I think that's when the report really blossomed and bloomed into the holistic approaches to solutions and ideas around what it is to be neurodivergent. And to use physical environments. Beyond the main comfort levels that we, that is very well researched. But there is more to it than that. We understood the scientific approach. And we knew the application, it was a now allowing people to bring that architecture to life.
Ian Ellison
Okay, so on that, then let's, let's bring it to life. So let's go in the direction of, it's not exactly findings, but the guidance and the notion of guidelines, rather than governance. I'm very, very acutely aware of language choices, because I think they are very powerful, perhaps not subtle, actually. But very powerful reasons. I'm always discussing, you know, what's the difference between a protocol or a rule versus a guideline or an etiquette, and you chose guidelines as your language here? But what you also did, and you framed it a little bit earlier, Josh, you said, you know, and this is you Centric Lab thinking from city scale, all the way into an individual room, you talk about Wayfinding. You talk about the place where an office exists, you talk about the building and office exists in and they talk about the office itself. So, you sort of create almost a journey towards work, where work happens. And for each of those levels, you talk about particular recommendations, particular guidelines, is that the way to sort of demonstrate to the listeners, so
Josh Artus
So, which one should I go first, and I'm gonna go with one of the examples that Luke talked about when he was living in East London, was also working at a very fancy developer, architect led building in East London. Winning awards, left, right and center kind of building. However, the wonderfully designed atrium, clubhouse, whatever you want to kind of call the modern hotel lobby meets fun park meets office building was sensorially really overstimulating fatiguing. And as a result, actually kind of painful. He, he was saying how he would cycle to work. And he would use the bike route around the back of the building. And that was fine, you go through the back of the building, you go around the back, up through the lift, and then you're in the office, you've got a keycard to get in, etc. But the bicycle route around the back wasn't really set up to allow pedestrians to walk through. And he got in trouble with property management, because it was for cyclists, not pedestrians. And there's a couple things to pick from this because first, you now have the scorning of someone that for having agency over their daytime, which has no deleterious impact to another individual. So he was seeking an alternative route, then he got scorn for it. So there is again, this, you are wrong, which is something that someone has gone, I needed to do this to make me feel right. And it's a bit of an absurdity that they were scorned and having to go into the main entrance that was problematic to them on those instances. Are you thinking this is before someone got to a desk? This is after someone before they got started work. And again, we don't know how he may have slept the night before. You know, people and suddenly we talk about in the report of people, for example, who are autistic can have more troubles finding a place to live because you know, the lettings market is a very vicious world, shall we call it and try and finding homes and if you're not playing a game or being forthright, if that's not part of your makeup, then you may just get left with the property kind of it's in a very noisy polluted place. So we don't even know how Luke may have slept the night before, or anyone else might have slept night before. Maybe they're past everywhere, there's lots of evening parties and noises and bus lanes, so they may get to work fatigued, then have this sensorial bombardment, before they get to a desk. So we've got the idea of workplace productivity being sort of knocked out the window.
And so all of this comes down to like, well, as, as people, as teams are sitting there in early stage planning, looking at the macro architecture of a building, the simple solution that we came to and have put forward is that on larger office and these are office lead buildings, having a diversity of ways in which you can access a building is more inclusive, and equitable. You can still have your big fancy office, yeah, grand entrance and all of that. But what about making sure that you do have a key card function to allow people to enter maybe through a smaller courtyard, it's around to the rear, that they can get upstairs into the lifts. Now, a lot of buildings have this, most buildings it's probably do this. But it's about ensuring that at least these thoughts are going into play. As all of a sudden, we haven't had to change the entire lighting system in a building, we haven't had to add X level of insulation over, I don't know, 10,000 square metres of wall space, we've just gone, I see that door over there on the plan, let's put a keycard function there. And so people can come through, not a big cost, there's not really, on a good architect will find a way that that cost doesn't even come anywhere near to a client's concern. And all of a sudden, you've made the building far more inclusive and straightforward. And I think that's, that's a way of kind of thinking holistically, and understanding the phenomena that you're actually looking at. And then understanding, well, we have this great level of agency, let's look at are building in a more holistic manner. And that's part of the recommendations that we've gotten into.
Chris Moriarty
I spent my life in marketing and career marketing, you've got to try and there's a real art to making sure you're not just looking at the world through your own little lens. And I guess that's what you're trying to do here with this report, isn't it to highlight stuff in a very accessible, I think, a very accessible way, in a very plain way of saying, Look, guys, this is just making sure everyone can have as much fun in this space as each other, you know, start kind of leaning too far one way, but there is an important message underneath it. And is that kind of, I guess it's it is typical of when people talk about the importance of diversity, because it's diversity of experience as well. And maybe that doesn't exist, where it needs to, to make sure that loop scenario doesn't happen again.
Josh Artus
Yeah. And there's a phrasing I, I tend to turn to and whether I'm correct in this but and I say this as a middle class, straight, fully abled white man that I'm gonna say this, I hope I don't get this misinterpreted. But diversity is not necessarily being invited to the table. It's, it's helping actually shape what that table is. And what I mean by that is, which is what you've just really pointed out, Chris, it's like in these early-stage conversations, is someone just kind of coming in as a tokenistic way? Or are these insights actually shaping those beginning conversations.
And this can be either someone consulting and directly informing an early stage design brief, or it could be when people read these types of reports and others and the other great work that happens out there, that when those early stage design briefs are coming in, the idea is who's our property manager, who's going to be our property and facilities manager, let's get them in, in this early stage. And maybe someone in that stage someone like Carl Brooks may have said, you know, what, guys, we get a lot of problems about accessibility in these kinds of ways. And I, you know, we just championed a report, we don't want to be exclusive to people who are in your diversion, because you know, our clients at the end of the day, the investors, the landlords, they've got their own ESG targets. And so let's just make sure not only are we doing the corporate work well, we're also doing the human work well. It's it really is looking at the full kind of vertical supply chain of the other sector and making sure that design is representative of each of the functionalities at those levels, as well as the best kind of research and practice that's coming in at those levels. Rather than I like this design, which unfortunately, we still see in a lot of built environment led briefs.
Chris Moriarty
I'm still sort of thinking about Luke's example here. It made me when you were talking about that particular workspace, it got me thinking about when I visited on a global brand that is very much would position itself on the youthful side of things wants to be very of the moment, and I was in a reception area with a live DJ, a live DJ in the reception, spinning his wheels of steel. A skate ramp with someone on the skate ramp, skating, a barista service in the middle of a row of arcade games at the other end. Now some people might be, if they've, if they've experienced this, it's quite unique reception.
But I remember finding it very stressful. Like, I was trying to order my coffee, I was trying to find where I'm going to go. And the blissful relief of getting into the elevator when those doors shut, and it was peaceful for a second. But by the time I got to my floor, I was fine, you know, I was back in the room and ready to go again, right. But having read this report, having listened to what you're talking about something that we might, you know, use as a slightly chippy anecdote about a stressful reception area, if that is your daily workplace, And there is a perception that people like us, like places like this, and you find it particularly stressful and want to avoid it, you're not only getting the physical impact of the increased stress every morning you go to work, but you're getting the social stress again, and that the you know, I think that's just a testament to the report, you guys have put together, that it's someone like me, who's been around this space and has heard this topic talked about before. Even I'm learning something about it that I had never really considered. And suddenly you start seeing this through the the eyes of people like Luke and think this isn't right. This is this is forget, you know, ticking a box to say, yes, we've done this and we're, we're more equitable now. We've done a D&I check, and everything's better. It's actually now this is just, this is just there's a fair.
Josh Artus
Fantastic point. And thank you for saying that. Because that that is so much of what the piece of work is, it's actually a very simple framing, once you're ready to accept that.
Ian Ellison
Off the back of what you were saying there, Josh, you talk in the report about enabling and disabling environments. You very simply provide some characteristics, characteristics of disabling spaces, and characteristics of enabling spaces. And, and they aren't just for people who identify as neurodiverse, I think that's the point that we're making here. They are also human spaces full of choice, tolerance and understanding. So, characteristics of enabling spaces, they provide equity, they provide safety, they're intuitive to use, they afford healing, they're diverse, and they provide dignity. And this bit really stood out to me, they’re ecological and what you mean by that is they are good for the planet. But also, I saw the sort of the urban realm of Centric Lab in this in that they fit also. And when you sort of hold up your spaces that you're responsible for whatever part of the of the provision you're responsible for, that's a really illuminating set of things, concepts to measure yourself against. And then if you cut right to the chase around office space, so we're in the building now. And how is that space affecting us? Quite often people default to well, the different sensual effect, right? Thermal, auditory, visual, olfactory and touch, right, five senses, but there's also navigation and orchestration in your list. And I thought navigation and orchestration are absolutely fascinating, because navigation links to wayfinding, right? So have you got an example there, which brings some of that slightly different thinking to life?
Josh Artus
I'm going to bring it to life, kind of as I did the case before, as I often do, kind of bring it in a propositional format. So the idea being wayfinding is very important. We see, for example, in the streets in London, you have a program called like Legible London. So you have all these posts everywhere that are helping people navigate that urban environment, through routes and walking maps. And that's very good. And we see this in office buildings, big office buildings, you will walk in and you will see signage, as we do in train stations, in airports, bus terminals, etc. And you see a pathway, oh, I need to find x space, it's on level two, I need to go to the east wing etc. For many people that's quite easy to process. However, as is often experienced by people who are neurodivergent sometimes that can be disorientating. And there's a deep deep neurological reasoning for that, that I don’t have the skills to go into but people like Professor Hugo Spears do and for example, a lot of his work is understanding how the brain makes sense of place and navigation through things like landmarks and he was part of one of the big award winning teams that I don't know if you may know about it there was a scientific study looking into the taxi drivers you know that sort of the the black taxis are common taxis that we see in the UK, they kind of Hackney Carriage style cabs and their navigational ability. And the end was What was that they identified through getting them to replicate, how do you get from A to B, and they narrate the story. They did a bunch of MRI studies and they found out, oh wow, there's this area, that is the posterior hippocampus and they were like, hang on, these guys have a slightly larger area than other people. And they open up this big field of neuroplasticity. I'm not going to go into that in particular, but the reason I bring it up is there is a deep, deep sets of neuroscience research into how people process visually and then from a mapping point of view where they are, which is the basis of what we see is wayfinding. And so I'll give the example of my brother Isaac, he came to stay with me when I was living in London, he didn't live in London lived further out into the home counties. And he came to do his study at an art course in Shoreditch and I lived in Kentish town. So if people familiar with that, that's kind of North London, going to the edges of East London. And it started out we were slowly walking towards the train station. And I was getting him to remember, because he couldn't get there by himself. And I don't mean this in an inferiority kind of way, but he was 19 years old, but we could not use the tube map and navigate around. And that's because of here the different challenges he faces in relationship to his neurodivergence. So we were going through them as like, right let's walk this street what's pointing out that’s important here? What's been pointing out here and day by day he was able to build these mental markers. And by the end of the two weeks he did the last three days he could get a walk out of my old flat, walk to the overground station, change over at Highbury and Islington get out of shortage and walk his route. And the reason I bring this up is if we had just said, go the tube and work it out. As I saw one day that when he walked down a platform, he turned left instead of right, he then got confused, realise I'm in the wrong place. Uh oh, wait, which way was left which way was right, I forgotten that, oh, bringing in what I said before both this kind of physiological stress response of oh, I'm in the wrong place. And then the compounding on mental. I'm such a loser. I'm here, what, oh my God, I've done this, again, these negative feedback loops that occur and breaking out into really a form of a panic attack that needed to then kind of re heal herself from. And so that is someone being made vulnerable by the situation that they have been put in. So when it comes to these large office buildings and stuff like that, having signage is good. But I would then posit, the question is, why are there so many beautiful CAD and then there'd be outdated, but at least BIM plans and floor plans and maps of buildings being created. Surely, that is an inclusivity map to go on a building website to go on the footer of invitations and emails to help someone to a virtual walkthrough of a building. So that as they approach the building, let alone as they've come from the train station, and they've got to there, maybe that's even signposted. As they're in the building. Once you go through the turnstiles, maybe, you know, turn right at a 45-degree angle, you'll see the East Wing walk towards that. And these steps, this is how people often build these mental marks of how they navigate. And so again, we're not necessarily trying to reinvent the wheel about how people move through a space, but by giving people some agency and dignity, to carve their own journey in the ways that they need to because the world isn't catered towards them. But by doing this, we're starting to cater towards people. We're removing that vulnerability and removing the chance of those negative experiences to occur so that by the time they get to their desk, they're like, hey, I'm ready to collaborate, I've got this great idea. And they're the ones leading the mess. They're leading the conversation, not sitting in the corner trying to nurse a headache, and the feelings of stress and the cortisol that's run in between them. So again, property managers, architects, investors, developers, those who own a website, we have the sitemap to navigate the actual architecture of a website. But why don't we have the sitemap for a building made available when this is already created?
Ian Ellison
Josh, one last quick area, I think of exploration. When I looked at the report, it helped me see hybrid, just from a slightly different perspective, again, to some of the perspectives that I've taken over the past three years or so since the word came, came charging into our consciousness off the back of the pandemic. And I saw pros and cons from a neurodiverse perspective. So, could you just talk to those a little bit or some of your key beliefs about hybrid or things that perhaps people thinking at hybrid who might be focusing on some areas might forget about and again, just need their awareness tuning in?
Josh Artus
What is becoming evident is that and we're seeing it in through the introduction of scheduling technologies, that having people in the right place at the right time is the most effective way to kind of sweat and assets if you are an occupier. You know, you're you using an office space, I think these are fantastic smart innovations. However, if we are constantly requesting and requiring people to move and travel at different times of the day, so on Tuesday, you're only coming in at 11 until three, and then after that you're not needed to be in the office. And all of this is arguably, perhaps to reduce square footage as some want to do to lower costs. And so you're trying to kind of sweat the asset that you have for this most capacity. On some days, you're coming in some days, you're not coming in. So what we're adding in is a variability and a really a challenging variability when we think of cities or at least very urbanised places, because they themselves have variabilities.
So we're having perhaps construction on one day, maybe on another tube strikes, if you're in London, for example, on one day, and another day, not so adding in all of these different variables to someone if we're focusing on the neurodiversity conversation, who may be incredibly patternised, and the need for pattern for their own mental health. So I talked about my brother before, and this pattern of creating this, this, this process that to follow, and that builds security, but there are people that do this in a myriad of ways. So when you destabilise that pattern, all of a sudden, you're destabilising the person, they have to rebuild new ones. So are they traveling perhaps at a more busier time, or a calmer time? So if you're forcing someone to be in first thing in the morning, are they being put into rush hour, and those challenges that that can be brought, but equally on the positive side, if they have the flexibility to travel at perhaps more amenable hours, you're reducing the load almost put upon a person before they've got to a workplace. So there's this kind of positive and negative both on that, that we have to kind of think about and understand who's our audience? What are we trying to do just to be cognisant of it, it may be that there's some things that are unavoidable that perhaps the mitigations that you introduce, as a business owner, can help compensate for some of those issues.
But with hybrid, I think when people almost get to the workplace, to not treat their time as disposable. And that okay, well, you're here for this meeting. And we're going to work here for today. But then you can go off into the open desk area, you know, so you're requested to be in a building for a specific period of time. But what happens if you've built up that, that that methodology that practice that daily routine that you need for your own stability, and then that's taken away from you what but what if you still try to have to go in and you, you get to work at 7.30 in the morning, because actually, you'd like to wake up early, it's the easiest time for you to get there. Are you waiting, then in the kind of open desk area until 11 o'clock, and that open desk area is a very transient space. You're then introducing unnecessary stresses to a person because you've not allowed for an enabling, and dignifying work environment for them to be in. So they were these questions to kind of ask about hybrid. And it's all of this is almost just a risk assessment process.
Ian Ellison
I think your phrase sweating the assets, which is a really common phrase in the built environment, the notion of sweating an asset for particular reasons, I think the way I would maybe explain it is, it causes both intended and unintended consequences. And from a neuro diversity perspective, we need to think about the unintended consequences, as much as we need to think about that elsewhere, or possibly even more. And the upshot is that you end up with greater equity, and inclusivity for everybody, but you're starting with a particular reason in mind.
Josh Artus
And that's really what a lot of this is, is removing those unnecessary stresses so that people are flourishing in any capacity. So it's, again, who are buildings for well, we know that occupies roughly spend about 90% of their overheads on staff. So that's where the building is for. So why are we not bringing in the same framings of where things like sports science can really improve the kind of the workplace science that we're doing? And certainly, we're just saying in this report, by the way, here's some insights and how to bring the neurodiversity movement into workplace culture and design.
-- Outro --
Chris Moriarty
So that's all for now, as we said at the top of the show, no reflection section just now we're going to do that after our chat with Dr. Joe Yarker in the next episode with Esme Banks Marr. But just as a bit of a taster, Ian, any hints on what you're thinking of the back of our chat with Josh?
Ian Ellison
Yeah, so I've got a few things that I already want to talk about. But I am as you have requested, going to keep quiet until next time, but if listeners want to kind of ponder something along the way, I think the distinction between physical architecture and social architecture which, when you dig into it are both kind of fundamental elements of placemaking, which is something that the Centric Lab is all about. I think the interplay between the physical and the social, from a design perspective is something that is really stand out and really important about all of this. But anyway, that is enough for now.
Chris Moriarty
Well, for me, I think there's a big bit about language. I just kept thinking about language and have been thinking about language since we've talked to Josh. So like we said, we will go into that much more depth with Esme next time around. So look, again, apologies for the slight delay between episodes. I can assure you though, that we have a stack of great interviews in the pipeline, we've got Dan Wakelin, of HCG talking to us about his recent thesis about the impacts of the pandemic on activity based working, wer’ve got a special episode about our time at the Workplace Trends conference. And of course, that Ben Waber interview, that's a whole lot more still to come on series two of the Workplace Geeks.
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