Things That Could Be Designed Better (Workplace Edition)
- Long straight hallways are bad. For one thing, it’s like driving through Wyoming. You don’t feel like you are getting anywhere. But worst is when you see someone you know as a tiny speck in the distance. When do you nod? Sinusoidal hallways could fix the latter, but long curving ones like on Star Trek may fix both.
- High traffic doors should have windows so you can see if someone is approaching from the other side. In security or privacy contexts, the windows could be translucent.
- Public restroom sink counters should be canted very slightly towards the sinks to prevent puddling.
- Shared refrigerators need a lot of work. Two proposals are:
- An array of small, locker-like (and lockable) refrigerators. This guarantees space and sandwich security while not giving up the economies of scale that sharing refrigeration bring.
- Give everyone their own minifridge that they can place in their office. (There was some boffo reason other than convenience I was going to give for this, but I can’t remember it now. Oh wait, I know! Pedal-power generated electricity! For exercise and earth-saving I’m a genius where’s my Nobel.)
It would even be possible to combine these ideas with modular minifridges. Environmentally-minded persons could stack them together whereas convenience-obsessed loners could keep it under a desk.
Refrigeration is overused in general. What do you need to refrigerate in an office or other shared environment?
I have spent upwards of thirty seconds considering this question, and everything I’ve come up with is either a genuine shared resource (a carton of milk for coffee) or a commodity that could be served from a vending machine (yogurt, soda).
Your sandwich or leftover pizza can relax at room temperature until noontime. I used to leave a salami sandwich outside in my truck every day for a whole summer, and look at me, healthy as an ox.
A different sandwich each day, I mean, not one sandwich the whole summer.
First of all, yogurt from a vending machine??
Second, that’s refrigeration. In the socialist utopia I’m creating, vending machines would be outlawed in the workplace. Come to think of it, so would the workplace.
Agree on 1. strongly agree on 2. nearly fainted from the intensity of my agreement on 3.
4. disagree: too much power drain. Coolers in individual offices/cubicles. The shared thing is a smallish freezer full of gelpacs in the breakroom for everybody to put in their individual coolers. The gelpacs have RFIDs with everybody’s employee IDs and you have to fish them out with special “smarttongs” that can read the RFIDs so that if you try to take one of somebody else’s gelpacs you get tazed or a beartrap closes on your hand or fluorescent gel squirts all over your face marking you as a dirty sponging thief for the rest of the workday.