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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.
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
As always with Apple it's form over function.
Design over safety or function. Yep, that would be Apple.
Sounds like the solution to this problem is to pull ones head out of his/her ass... erm phone while walking around.
Where's that lady with the big sledge hammer when you need her?
The conjunction of this with the FDA Concussion Blood-test story is too delicious!
Someplace else I had read Apple had planned to place graphics on all the windows to prevent this sort of thing, which has now been moved to a "higher priority". How they could open before that was done, is beyond me...
Just further evidence that the physical world is more and more becoming like software, where you always want to avoid being in the early beta if possible.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Classic Apple. Never let users or usability stand in the way of elegant design.
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.
Check your premises.
We're just going to have to have our phones tell us when we're about to walk into something. There's no other way to know.
There is a joke here about Windows, but I can't seem to see it.
The next best thing from Apple: iWatchout.
It can be an iPhone app which uses the rear camera facing forward, or maybe some new ranging sensor (IR, sonar, laser) on a future iPhone, which alerts the user when they are about to walk into a hard surface (wall, door, ...).
Can be combined with Apple Maps and GPS, to also alert if there are nearby cliffs or other geographical hazards.
A building that punishes people for working for an amoral megacorp is exactly what Apple employees deserve.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Remove the employees.
Some settling may occur during posting.
I am sure that Apple will come up with some app to warn you as you approach a wall. That would be much simpler than just asking your employees to put away the phones and keep their eyes on the path when walking.
You do it for A, A does it for B, and B does it for you, allowing you all perfect deniability, "I didn't do this!"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Shiny and pretty and detached from reality.
Until OSHA comes into play.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
this will be a wake up call for the world.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
no one saw that coming...
I'll show myself out now...
"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.
I'm relatively sure that this has nothing to do with the fact that California now has legal weed. Sixty percent sure.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Coat all the interior windows with two way mirror film. It will make it a more fun house to work in ...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
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.
I mean seriously why do they even have their smartphones at work? Doesn't that go against virtually all sane rules on corporate security?
Article is useless without pictures of the issue. Article only contains pictures of the outside of the building. I will assume they are just trolling.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
If its unsafe file a complaint with OSHA. But really what do you expect when your not paying attention to your surrounding while walking?? Apple employees must be the most conceded,stuck up people in the world. Guess walking into other people their is a normal part of the work day too.
Jack of all trades,master of none
don't know about your workplace but can't function without smartphone at mine. multi-factor authentication one reason, system alerts another, besides the meeting reminders and yes actual phone calls
The first time I saw this issue was when I was on a field trip in the 1970s. One of my classmates had one of the new handheld Mattel Football games and was playing it as we walked around.
We were in one of those museums that has glass walls dividing the major rooms, and he smacked into one at full waking pace. He ended up with a nasty bloody nose. He might even have broken his nose; I can't remember. However, one thing I have always remembered since then is to look up frequently if I'm walking around with some kind of device.
No. Unless somehow your corporate security requires a lot more than the Fortune 500 companies I've worked at, plus all of the smaller ones.
About the only places I've seen normally needing "no phones" security are locations requiring high security by the government or AV labs. Anything else for most companies is paranoid overreach and a grave breach of common sense. Anything else between "no phones" and "take pictures and recording of everything" can be dealt with by legal agreements and consequences.
That is all.
If only Steve Jobs were here to tell the employees how they've been misusing their walls. But seriously, if your walls are glass, why bother using walls at all? Just have the necessary support beams (made of glass, even, if you really want to) and be done with it.
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.
I'm wondering if they hired new architectural integrity enforcers to prevent post-its and other ad-hoc field deviations from the new design or whether they just re-tasked existing HR shills for this job.
Stuart Brand wrote a book, published back in 1994, about just this kind of thing, How Buildings Learn. (also here)
This, from the Wikipedia summary of the accompanying BBC TV series, is relevant to the Apple UFO:
Brand is highly critical of the entire modernist approach to architecture. He fully rejects the "center out" approach of design, where a single person or group designs a building for others to use, in favor of an evolutionary approach where owners can change a building over time to meet their needs.
So when Apple employees attempt to, as Brand would say, "change a building.. to meet their needs," by sticking Post-its to the glass partitions, management undid that. Apple is all in on center out.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Seems Apple has heralded Aesthetics as their God over the perceived lower demon of Function. Let their broken noses shine the path to the one true religion of where Form follows Function. As they eat their own dog food in hospital waiting rooms, may they realize the errors of their ways.
As it says in our Holy Books, the pursuit of The Shiny to the exclusion of everything else is the root of all Evil.
But the only way to have usable glass walls is to use overlays on them.
I'd link to examples, but Google removed the "view image" buttons and I don't want to force anyone to view pinterest pages.
#DeleteFacebook
You would think that the bird-shaped smudges on the exterior windows would prevent bird strikes, too, but apparently not. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Add some artsy-fartsy at certain areas of the glass. A millennial version of a flower sticker people would put on sliding patio doors.
They could design it so it matches their decor and a contractor could make a nice chunk of change for overpriced stickers.
Everybody's Happy!
The summary suggests people are also walking into glass that is inside the building (not just the window panes). There are times however when floor-to-ceiling glass inside a building can be very hard to see, especially if the framing of it was intentionally hidden to prevent it from detracting from the ambiance. I've seen people who were not distracted by anything walk right into glass of that sort simply because they didn't know it was there.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
No, classic Apple would've gotten it right. ...
Are they the ones who made a one-button mouse? Would they extend that to building elements, like only one button out/inside the elevators?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
On the assumption that the aesthetic is an exterior rather than interior concern....they could add some sort of projection onto the glass, so that people on the inside would recognize it (out of the corner of their eye I suppose) just before they walk into it. Rather than the projection being on all the time, it could be triggered by motion/heat or something.
This suggestion is slightly more tongue-in-cheek, than head-up-ass...but only slightly.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I mean seriously why do they even have their smartphones at work? Doesn't that go against virtually all sane rules on corporate security?
I can think of a lot of words that employees would use to describe a security policy banning smartphones.
Ironically, sane isn't one of them.
This is against building code regulations in Europe. You cannot have a fully transparent wall or door that people might walk into it. Usually, you find stripes of frosted glass around the 1.2-1.7 m height, to make sure people don't walk into it.
Fear is the mind-killer.
It remind me of the book "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It is a dystopian story about a totalitarian state where all of the architecture was glass so everyone could see what everyone else was doing as one way to enforce conformity. It was a society with no concept of privacy or individuality. So far the predictions of the dystopian stories like We and 1984 are coming true without government coercion.
This is funny as hell, perhaps the phone addicted employees should put the iPhone down and watch where they are walking. Makes me wonder why Apple didn't include fountains and reflection pools.
It's just the next iteration of the "walled garden" approach that Apple has always been fond of.
are you required to walk while dealing with those? check OSHA to make sure...
It's not a bug. It's a a feature!
Idiots! Watch where you are going.
And any of them that walk into more than one glass wall should be fired.
Yes, there's bad architecture. A round glass pentagon. Pretty brilliant all right, just the sort of thing I'd expect from Jobs.
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.
So where are all of the don't throw rocks in a glass house jokes........
and get some of their surplus glass holes.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I got caught in a situation pretty nearly exactly like this.
The Oslo airport customs section is (or at least was) designed with the typical Scandinavian ultra-minimalist glass partitions and bleached wood everywhere. Worse, they use minimalist signage as well - not even in WORDS but in the "universalist" iconography that someone believes 'everyone should be able to understand' but which is (to this pretty well-traveled American) baffling.
Finally, I'm sure to make it simpler for people dragging luggage, they have ONLY proximity-activated doors. So you're in this light-wood-floored and glass-walled maze of corridors and square rooms, in which the walls are indistinguishable from the doors until you walk within a half-meter of them, and then they slide open.
Brand new, it seemed, so no cues in the floor-wear to suggest which way was right.
I was unfortunately the first off the plane, so I was repeatedly confronted by 4m x 4m square glass walled rooms, in which I'd walk toward one wall, it wouldn't auto-open, and I'd veer to a different wall (invariably the WRONG one - my luck) and THAT wouldn't open, while determinedly-helpful Norwegian security on the other side of the glass would try to point me toward whichever wall was the 'right' one to escape that FUCKING MAZE. I have to imagine they thought I was hilarious. It was, objectively.
I don't know if I'm particularly stupid but I'd like to think it was just because I was tired after a long flight but I COULDN'T FIND MY OUT OF THE THING.
-Styopa
Thank you. I've said for a long time now that Apple's design philosophy is mostly driven by form over function. This makes their design pretty terrible functionally, which is diametrically opposed to the popular opinion that their design is great. Sure, aesthetically it is, but the functionality really suffers. The list of their design mistakes due to this wrong-headed design philosophy is long. Just off the top of my head:
- Flat square keys on keyboards, which makes it impossible for your fingers to center on the keys.
- Glossy screens which cause all kinds of glare problems.
- Sharp edges on laptop cases which dig and cut into hands and wrists.
- Aluminum cases on laptops, which dent easily.
- Polished metal cases on phones, which scratch incredibly easily.
- The removal of 3.5mm, 1/8th inch headphone jacks on phones.
- The removal of Ethernet ports on laptops.
All those are ridiculous functional design blunders that were made mostly for the aesthetics of their devices. In other words, form over function.
We are in the midst of moving to a new office. Our office is all engineering (75% software, 25% hardware). The big wigs of course hired some expensive consultants to help plan the new place.
Sure enough the presentation had a big heap of glass and open office space. The designs look amazing and futuristic in renderings for sure. Even the chair colors were chosen to "inspire".
It is ALL BS. Engineers need quiet caves to work in, nice quiet places to focus on work. Preferably with walls and doors that keep sound, odors, and view of active hallways out. When has a real project ever failed due to improper chair color choice?!
Glass boxes are not soundproof, and lead to distraction every time someone walks within view. Glass in lieu of whiteboards is just a disaster.
Open offices result in LESS, not more communication. The more the entire office overhears everything you say, the less you feel like talking to someone about issues/bugs/etc. The madness needs to end.
The goal should not be best design, but highest productivity. End this madness!
Apple has become far more transparent than any other company yet everyone still complains.
Apple is often almost ridiculously stubborn about the most stupid things: two button mice; minimally ergonomic mice; being able to resize windows from any edge or corner; a maximize window button; mouse support on iOS...
Fortunately, they've (eventually... finally...) implemented most of the stuff listed above, but they remain ridiculously stubborn about a few of them. Maybe in five or ten years...
you're doing it wrong.
Spaceship Campus; otherwise known as an 'office'.
Reminds me of how they're trying to pretend their shop in a public space in Melbourne is not a shop by calling it an 'experience centre' or some crap like that.
... a proximity sensor.
That will be really fun...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
To Apple, form takes precedence over function. That's the way they design all of their products: is it any wonder that's how they'd demand their new campus be designed?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
pffft, only accidents with smartphones in Chicago I know of are people getting hit while walking across street in morning commute while engrossed in their toy. one dumb bitch even stepped into open sewer surrounded by warning signs while texting.