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

Posted by msmash on from the design-champions dept.

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.

8 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Sheeple by cob666 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So... people don't pay attention to their surroundings and somehow it's the building's fault?

    --
    Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
    1. Re:Sheeple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I work in a building with a lot of glass conference rooms and offices. The first few weeks it happened to a lot of people. I thought it was ridiculous, and then in a hurry I walked through what I thought was an open space with a cup of coffee. Not looking at my phone, I was focused on what was on the other side of the glass.

    2. Re:Sheeple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      When you design it like a mirror maze; yes.

      You might have a point if every employee was banging into walls multiple times a day. That's not the case, but hey, let's continue to dismiss and excuse smartphone addiction and general ignorance when it comes to ones surroundings.

      After all, over-coddling and excusing stupid behavior worked out so well with Millennials...

    3. Re:Sheeple by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Interesting

      To be fair, some of these people are so glued to their phones that they would walk into a very obvious brick wall. For the people I view who are walking around oblivious to the world while checking their smartphone, they do seem to rely on peripheral vision and will stop just a foot or two short of bumping into stuff. Ie, the carpet pattern changed, they can see the base of the wall, etc. But if there was a clear glass wall that went to the floor without any wall base, I could easily see these people smacking into the glass.

  2. Re:"The notes were removed because they detracted. by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Until OSHA comes into play.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  3. Re:Feature not a bug. by Dogtanian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The best bit is how wonderfully appropriate it all is. They're suffering because Apple placed the aesthetics of the building above everything else (to the extent of removing their post-it notes).

    And the icing on the cake is that it's happening because they're using their iPhones in the same manner as the countless smartphone zombies their product helped spawn.

    --
    "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  4. It's not a flaw by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...they're using it wrong. (snerk)

    But seriously, this reminds me (entirely from memory as I don't have it in front of me) of Tom Wolfe's book on modern architecture, where he describes the first boxy modern skyscrapers with floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall windows. Tenants would put lamps or trash cans, bookcases, anything in front of the windows to create a demarcation between the office and empty air 20+ floors up. The architects would come by and patiently remove the obstacles and chide the tenants for spoiling the look.

    The point, as I recall, being, what looks cool and progressive doesn't necessarily wear well in daily use. Buildings should first be designed to be usable for their intended purpose. If you can also make them cool looking, that's a bonus.

    But this is Apple, so looking cool and innovative probably *is* the intended purpose. With usability a bit further down the list.

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  5. Re:"The notes were removed because they detracted. by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They went with a one-button mouse to force programmers to write software which could be controlled by a single mouse button. Before then, programmers would write whatever they wanted and expected users to learn all the esoteric intricacies of how their software operated. In that respect, the one-button mouse succeeded marvelously in creating a unified UI experience, and vastly reducing the amount of learning required of users to use a computer.

    Apple's mistake with the one-button mouse was sticking to a single button long after their original success had ingrained certain UI functionality into that single button. They could've added a second or even third button later on (as Windows did) without diminishing the benefit to UI simplicity that the single-button mouse had fostered. But by then they were well down their Form uber alles path, and stuck with the one-button mouse.