Courses:

Introduction


The theme of this workshop is the design of the changing workplace. The five objectives of the Workshop are to:

• make MIT graduate students fully aware of emerging technological, economic and social trends that are revolutionizing the working environment;
  
• explore and develop, within a coherent intellectual framework, the widest possible range of practical techniques for measuring the performance of the working environment;
  
• carry out individual field work in a real context - MIT's new Aero/Astro Lab - as part of a parallel program of post occupancy evaluation;
  
• propose new measures that throw light on the relationship between business purpose and the success of some aspect of workplace design;
  
• systematically relate design evaluation to the urgent need - and unrealized potential for radical design innovation.

Two major features of the workshop will be

• exposing students to advanced practice by inviting knowledgeable clients and experienced practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds to our weekly discussions and
  
• access to the real, ongoing, highly important and extremely practical evaluative exercise being conducted by Janet Tan, a former student of this Workshop, at the Aero/Astro Lab.

This Workshop is part of a series being conducted by Francis Duffy during his three year Visiting Professorship at MIT on the overall theme of innovative workplace design. Four initial public seminars (Spring 2001) set the scene. The First Workshop (Fall 2001) examined innovation in the design of the workplace through case studies. Interesting differences both in process and end product were recorded. The Second Workshop (Spring 2002) focused on 'Missing Products' - the main task was for students to define and specify services or products implied by 'New Ways of Working' that are still missing from the catalogues and other offerings of conventional suppliers of office products and real estate services. The current Third Workshop (Fall 2002) is intended to progress the theme of design innovation by examining in some detail the techniques that are now available to help designers anticipate and comprehend the emerging requirements of ever more demanding knowledge workers equipped with increasingly powerful technology.