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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.

18 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: 5, Insightful

      When you design it like a mirror maze; yes.

    2. Re:Sheeple by Jeremi · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not "somehow" -- there's a very specific mechanism: the walls are invisible.

      The fix is easy enough, however -- just don't clean the class, and eventually the bloodstains will render the problem areas opaque.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    3. Re:Sheeple by geekmux · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      What did Reality say to the Apple employee?

      You're holding it wrong.

    4. Re:Sheeple by DarkOx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    5. 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.

    6. Re:Sheeple by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 5, Funny

      No they won't. The only blood will be on the floors where the panes have shattered and fallen down.

      No, that's unlikely. I've seen Apple customers and those that work at the Apple stores. They mostly seem to be skinny little hipster types. They don't have enough mass to walk into safety glass and actually break it.

      Now if they have a visiting delegation from Walmart, between the mass of the scooters and the passengers, the panes of glass are likely to fall out from the weight on the floor causing the base of the wall to warp.

    7. Re:Sheeple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      lol.... *** triggered millennial ***

      Cool way to deal with your problems, lash out then cry it out.

  2. Oh Apple. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Where's that lady with the big sledge hammer when you need her?

  3. Great pairing with the FDA story by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  4. "The notes were removed because they detracted..." by geschbacher79 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  5. Root Cause Flaw by forkfail · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Root Cause Flaw by quietwalker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Root Cause Flaw by geekmux · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ...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.

  6. Next iphone to have rangefinder by Leuf · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Take a note from Microsoft by freeze128 · · Score: 5, Funny

    There is a joke here about Windows, but I can't seem to see it.

  8. Re:"The notes were removed because they detracted. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. 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.