How Can Anthropology And Architecture Converge To Shape The Office Of Tomorrow?

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How Can Anthropology And Architecture Converge To Shape The Office Of Tomorrow?

Melissa Fisher, PhD and Hana Kassem , FAIA explore how a cultural anthropological understanding can inform architectural design to create more human-centric, inclusive, resilient, healthy, and sustainable work environments and cultures. In collaboration with Work Design Magazine

• Architects must align their designs with the unique culture and needs of the organization and society of today, fostering a sense of identity and belonging among employees.?
• As many companies look at rethinking their workplace environments for the needs of today, they may want to draw on anthropological methods and analysis to answer certain critical questions.?
• Anthropology can not only help us understand workplace culture and the worldview of various employees — it can also provide deep insight into the broader socio-cultural and economic context that shape employees’ ideas and behavior towards work.

Following the “work-from-home” reality of the pandemic, and movements like Black Lives Matter, in addition to climate activism, and the omnipresence of AI, we find ourselves in a sea of changes that are tangibly influencing the way we work and live. How can we design more human-centric, inclusive, resilient, healthy, and sustainable work environments that support the evolving workplace culture of today?

To address this question, it is crucial to recognize the significance of ideas originating from cultural anthropology, a field often misperceived as exclusively studying the “exotic.” We believe that a cultural anthropological perspective can offer valuable insights that can enrich and shape architectural approaches during the current era of transformation.

Today anthropologists are more likely to study Wall Street firms or Silicon Valley technology startups, rather than the Kula ring of economic exchange in the Trobriand Islands. This work has shown the ways the cultural, social, and spatial structures, including the specifics of design, and amenities matter most in workplace environments. For example, as ethnographers of finance sectors observe, the spatial arrangement of where traders sit on the trading floor has an impact on how they see and hear other traders, access technologies, and receive and interpret information (Downey and Fisher, 2006).

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