Germans Increase Office Efficiency With "Cloud Ceiling"

Griller_GT writes "According to the top researchers of the Fraunhofer-Institut für Arbeitswirtschaft und Organization (IAO) in Stuttgart, the human mind is set up to work at its best under the open sky, with changing illumination caused by clouds passing overhead. The unvarying glare of office lighting is sub-optimal, therefore, and in order to wring the last ounce of efficiency from German workers whose productivity has already been pushed to unprecedented heights they have decided to rectify this with a LED cloud ceiling."

Comments

I approve!

[snowgirl]

A lot of what injures productivity is boredom. Having a non-constant light source could definitely keep things more interesting, even when you don't particularly notice it.

Keep workers happy == keep workers productive.

Re:I approve!

[Synerg1y]

FTW,

when they see workers dozing off they should be able to initiate thunder and lightning. A bucket rain shower in an extreme case.

unprecedented heights of productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we PLEASE stop with this hyperbolic "productivity" nonsense? If people were SO productive, what are they producing? Why does it take 25 years to pay a house that can be built in 6 weeks? Why are we still working 40 hour weeks? The average work week went from 100 to 50 hours in the 19th century, with 19th century technology!

What are we producing, why, and for who?

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[egomaniac]

It's not fair to say that the house is built in six weeks. Yes, a house can be assembled from finished materials in six weeks, but you're not counting the effort to cut down the trees, transport them to a lumber mill, turn them into boards, mine the gypsum, turn it into drywall, mine the iron, convert the iron into steel wire, turn the steel wire into nails, refine oil into the raw plastic for pipes, mold the plastic into pipes and pipe fittings, transport all of these products all of the way from the factory to the building site, and on and on and on.

You can only build a house in six weeks because an army of people is busily creating all of these finished materials for you, and if you add up all of the labor, it probably does come to somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty man-years of work to create a house.

Consistent?

[zandeez]

Is this proven to be consistent and will it continue to have this effect on the workers? I'd like to reference the Hawthorne Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect which basically states that any change to the working environment will increase productivity temporarily. So how long until it gets old and productivity slumps again?

CEO is a genius!

[GodfatherofSoul]

His "researchers" also discovered that humans respond better when working at ambient temperatures and when exposed to the elements. They also like to be beaten with whips when they're insubordinate.

Re:I dunno.

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be at my best, coding in a Zeppelin, cruising silently above it all.

So a LED Zeppelin then?

I live in the Seattle Area and I'm wondering...

[ravenscar]

What are the blue LEDs for?

Re:Awesome

[JWSmythe]

It's not about replicating sunlight. It's about making someone a metric fucktonne of money making LED simulated skies in ceiling panels.

According to the article, each tile is 288 LEDs. Excuse me while I do some math, so this will make sense in US dollars, and the size of a ceiling tile.

A standard office ceiling tile is 2'x4' (0.6mx1.2m).
The article shows a price of 1000 euros per square meter. (1 sq/m = 10.764 sq/ft).
92.90 euros per sq/ft, or $118.88 USD per sq/ft.
8 sq/ft per panel. or $951.04 per panel.

The density of the LEDs is pretty sparse. 36 LEDs per square foot, or 0.25 per square inch. So one LED per 4 square inches. That would explain why the room looks so dark, compared to the overcast day outside the window.

A modest size office space at 500 sq/ft room would cost roughly $60,000 to put this ceiling into. That's a lot of money to waste on ceiling tiles. It would have probably done very well during the dotcom bubble. Now, that's a lot of other equipment, or salaries for a few employees for a year.

They don't go into the cost of installation, nor MTBF of the equipment. If panels need to be changed yearly for whatever reason, that would get pretty damned expensive. The LEDs should live a long time, but who knows how long their control circuitry will survive.

alternative

[Khashishi]

Or, you know, they could just install windows. (lowercase w)

Not really about the clouds

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

They are ignoring one fundamental principle of cubical life, anything new introduced into an office environment will increase productivity, as demonstrated on Better Off Ted.

They could have achieved the same results by replacing one black chair with a red one for a much more cost efficient solution. When the office productivity dips again, swap which person get the red chair. They will think its a performance incentive and everyone will be working hard vying for the coveted red chair.