Let’s do research. Let’s look at research. Let’s look at what already works.

That money could have created something genuinely purposeful. Something that would benefit people in Saudi Arabia.

Let’s not chase the shiny. Let’s chase the meaningful.

2/2

With the setup on the left, neither the meeting will be good, nor will the work at the desks be good. Everyone loses.

Avoid when possible.

There's also a variation of this where the open collaboration area is separated by a curtain. The curtains usually don't do much.

3/3

What will happen to the people working at the desks on the right? They’ll be distracted and irritated.

But that's not all. Do you know what people need to have high-quality, open and efficient conversations? Privacy - the feeling that what you say stays between the people in the meeting.

2/3

Big thanks to everyone who is already working on making this into a reality.

Article that inspired this thread: drrachelbarr.substack.com/p/how-to-bui...

And I imagine that brave investors, developers and architects who are disenchanted with how things work today will join our cause.

For our future, I imagine architecture that puts the human being with all their needs and their enjoyment on the pedestal. One that will be built on the best evidence about its impact on our nervous system, yet designed with elaborate detail and care that communicates humanness and safety.

I agree that it is time for a new romanticism, in society as a whole, but also in architecture and design.

This led to a society with an extreme focus on optimization, which often strips us of humanity, dignity, and joy. Yet at the same time we are so wasteful that an immense talent pool works on addictive products and low quality slop simply because it happens to hack our primal brain and earns a lot.

Anyway, an article on romantic resurgence in science that was sent to me by my friend Kristina Pomothy resonated with me exactly for this reason. As a society, we ended up incentivizing two things - depth without breadth and shallowness without substance.

But I might be the go-to person when someone is facing a complex challenge that requires user research, translation of scientific evidence, strategic thinking, skillful communication and technology-related decisions (shameless plug).

It is why I might not be the deepest expert on the neuroscience of the impact of architectural visual stimuli on stress-related inflammation in the brain, as one of my favorite personalities in our community, Cleo Valentine, is.

Thanks to that, I was fortunate to experience a truly multidomain life so far, spanning technology, journalism, photography, marketing, psychology, architecture and many other fields that I did not make a career out of.

Another reason I feel this purpose is that I am able to connect many disciplines in my work. Since I was a child, my issue was not that I did not know what to do. It was that I wanted to do everything (except for being a doctor, brrrr).