Apple's New Spaceship Campus Has One Flaw -- and It Hurts (bloomberg.com)

Mark Bergen, writing for Bloomberg: The centerpiece of Apple's new headquarters is a massive, ring-shaped office overflowing with panes of glass, a testament to the company's famed design-obsessed aesthetic. There's been one hiccup since it opened last year: Apple employees keep smacking into the glass. Surrounding the Cupertino, California-based building are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass. Inside are work spaces, dubbed "pods," also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That's resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents. Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building's design, the people said.

Comments

As always...

[Anonymous Coward]

As always with Apple it's form over function.

Cliche behavior? metaphor for priorities?

[Anonymous Coward]

Design over safety or function. Yep, that would be Apple.

Re:Sheeple

[Anonymous Coward]

When you design it like a mirror maze; yes.

"The notes were removed because they detracted..."

[geschbacher79]

Classic Apple. Never let users or usability stand in the way of elegant design.

Root Cause Flaw

[forkfail]

People may be walking into glass, which indeed seems problematic, but that is only a symptom of the real flaw in Apple's approach.

And that critical design flaw is open plan seating. And Apple employees know it, and hate it.

https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...

Collaboration and productivity are not improved in the slightest by this. They are, in fact, degraded:

http://www.bbc.com/capital/sto...

The only thing that is increased, then, aside from tempers, are the number of beans the bean counters get to count. It is, after all, cheaper to pack sardines into a can than it is to individually wrap them.

Re:Root Cause Flaw

[quietwalker]

Ah yes. There's many, many, oh-so-many reasons to /not/ use open seating. Many studies have been done on this. For your HPE - 'High Productivity Employees', it's awful. For some groups, like marketing or sales, it may actually be helpful, some of the time. For any workers that don't need to continually and constantly collaborate and only occasionally need to get marching orders or coordinate, they have these things called 'meetings' that occur in an open-seating layout called 'meeting rooms'.

Yet for a design concept that originated in the 70's, with as much consideration as the design of the liver-shaped coffee table, it is still held to be a sign of a future-forward progressive workplace - and I don't even know what that's /objectively/ even supposed to mean. Seriously. I've asked. No one can point to a metric that you'd want to go up that's actually been shown, even in a subjective questionnaire form (like, before and after "Rate your morale on a scale of 1-10").

No, what you get is design firms convincing management that this is the right thing to do, and how happy they'll feel, and how empowered and collaborative and cross-project-discipline-y their workplace will be, and management eventually swallows the kool-aid and starts believing it.

This is worlds away from IBM's actual workplace design studies in the 50's and 60's where they found out that employees are 0.13% (or something, don't quote me on that) more efficient when the walls are painted a sort of pale yellow, and thanks for that trend, jerks. At least that was scientifically determined. This is just pretty-to-look at junk that no CEO worth their salt should ever consider signing off on, unless they NEED to make their workplace less functional.

Re:Root Cause Flaw

[geekmux]

...The only thing that is increased, then, aside from tempers, are the number of beans the bean counters get to count. It is, after all, cheaper to pack sardines into a can than it is to individually wrap them.

Uh, cheaper? Are you saying this one-of-a-kind-Jobs-dream building was cost-effective?

For what they paid, they could have probably constructed a normal building with individually wrapped luxury offices for every employee.

Re:Sheeple

[DarkOx]

No the triumph of form over function is to blame. The issue in the name of meeting a certain style and aesthetic, Apple has built a building that is difficult to navigate for the humans its designed to house.

Art (visual art especially) can exist for its own sake, but Architecture *should* be functional because most spaces we design have a function and first and foremost they enable that function.

Re:Sheeple

[Anonymous Coward]

... "over-coddling"

For you problems aren't real unless you face them personally, which is the most narcissistic, child-like response to anything. I sincerely hope you get slammed by some act of user-hostile architecture in the very near future, perhaps it will knock some sense into that dense cranium.

They're consistent at least

[quietwalker]

"Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building's design, the people said."

Sure, you could make it FUNCTIONAL, but that's not what it's there for. It's there to look pretty, set standards, and impress folks for whom functionality is not a concern.

Design over functionality. *checks apple product line for the last decade* Yup. Pretty consistent.

Note, there is a thing called 'Good Design' that actually marries looks and functionality, but apple hasn't had a horse in that race for a good long time.

Re:"The notes were removed because they detracted.

[jeffb (2.718)]

No, classic Apple would've gotten it right. Tog would've laughed this design out of the building, with a highlight reel showing people bonking into the glass walls, and how sensible visible elements on the glass fixed the problem.

I miss classic Apple.