Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects

大师建筑事务所已采用大数据进行办公设计
Firms Like Zaha Hadid Architects Are Revolutionizing Office Design Using Big Data

由专筑网李韧，曹逸希编译

本文最初发表于《Metropolis Magazine》，标题为“拥有大数据的建筑师才能清晰地看清项目”。

能够提升员工工作效率的办公场所一直是企业管理者的一大难题。但是在许多现代办公场所诞生之前，许多设计师和研究者已经就这个问题进行了长时间的钻研，例如那些能够提升员工效率的工厂。在20世纪60年代，赫尔曼•米勒（Herman Miller）的办公家具生产线的发明者罗伯特•普罗斯特（Robert Propst）和其他合作伙伴已经对工作空间进行了探索，然后便有了现代化办公隔间的产生。

办公场所的发展很大程度上依赖于企业管理人员对员工的有效观察与判断。在当前社会，急速的发展让设计师能够将更多先进的方式运用于办公场所的设计中，例如传感器、互联网家具装置，以及数据分析。伦敦建筑师Uli Blum说：“你应该充分考虑每一位员工，每个人都有不同的需求。如果想要设计出好的办公空间，那么这便是最根本的问题，因此最直接的方式便是直接询问。”但是，如果要通过一个设计满足成百上千员工的需求，那么这就有些不切实际。

This article was originially published by Metropolis Magazine as "Architects, Armed with Data, Are Seeing the Workplace Like Never Before."
A workplace that improves employee productivity and efficiency has been a white whale of corporate managers for decades. But even before the office as we know it today was born, designers and innovators were already studying sites of labor, such as the factory, to devise strategies to boost worker performance. By the 1960s, Robert Propst, the inventor behind Herman Miller’s Action Office line of workplace furniture, and others were conducting workspace research that would ultimately lead to the creation of the modern cubicle.
These developments relied largely on observation and intuition to organize office workers in purportedly effective ways. Now, advances in technology allow designers to take a more sophisticated approach, using sensors, internet-connected furniture and fixtures, and data analytics to study offices in real time. “You can take into account every single employee, and people are very different,” says London architect Uli Blum. “It’s about solving the fundamental problems of getting people the environment they need. And the easiest way is to ask them,” he adds. But finding out the needs of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers can quickly become an exercise in futility.


ZHA's Galaxy SOHO. Image © Iwan Baan


Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects


Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects

三年前，Blum在扎哈建筑事务所（ZHA）进行模块单元分析与观察的工作，其团队早早地便将工作重心放在工作场所的研究之中。因此，Blum决定从自己的办公室下手：“我们在自己的办公室里安装了传感器，这样能够更好地了解整个空间。”这组装置能够监控空气密度、噪音、湿度、光线、温度、空气质量，其中还设置有智能监控摄像头，它能够追踪办公人员的所处位置，同时还能保证员工的隐私。Blum说：“他们并不知道自己看到的那个人是谁。”

Blum helped found the Analytics and Insight unit at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) three years ago. His team has focused its early efforts on devising methods to study the workplace and anticipate employee needs. Naturally, Blum decided to experiment with his own office first: “We installed sensors to understand our own workplace better,” he explains, referring to a cluster of devices that monitor visibility, noise, humidity, light, temperature, and air quality. Among these were smart surveillance cameras that track the location, but not the identity, of workers over time. “They don’t know who they see,” Blum says reassuringly.


Image Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects

办公试点能够测试出最适合员工的工作空间。因此这也能成为证明企业标志性审美因素的工具。他说：“设计师能够创造美丽的形状，但是我们需要证明，为什么我们设计出的形状比别人的更好，那么这就涉及到方法的比较，这其中就包含有空间数据信息。”

Blum建议，高效办公空间的设计并没有标准，它是一个整体性空间，同时满足个人的需求。在这种思路之中，他同以往的设计师分享了这样的一种基本假设，即空间既能让使用功能更加完善，同时也能让使用者用起来感到十分不便，换句话说，水能载舟亦能覆舟。对于设计师来说，其中的挑战在于找到空间的不同对功能组织的影响。

在20世纪初，Frederick Winslow Taylor因其所塑造的工业办公环境而闻名，他的工作成果对现代化办公场所的发展也具有极大的影响。Taylor开创了先进的科学管理领域，根据敏锐的观察，简化工业生产过程，从而大大提高工业生产效率。Taylor的学生通过了解机器、员工与工厂之间的相互关系，明确了现代办公场所的基本原则，即这是人、场所、工作机器之间的集合。夫妻档Frank和 Lillian Gilbreth与Taylor闻名于同一时代，他们通过减少不必要的时间与人力浪费来将员工的生产力发挥得淋漓尽致，他们认为，工作中的许多重复动作都不必要，因此，他们发明的技术大大地提升了员工的工作实际输出量。但是这种方法也具有局限性，因为工人只能通过快速地移动来完成任务，所以久而久之，工人也容易疲劳。

那么如何克服这一障碍呢？唯一的办法便是将改造的重点从员工自身效率转移到办公场所之中，并且充分了解空间自身是否具有缓解压力、提升员工健康状况的特质。在上世纪末、本世纪初，为了提升机器的工作效率，工厂中安装了空调，这也是对工作环境改善的一大代表，这样的想法明显有效，因此在现代办公场所中，空调愈发普及，早期的研究者认为，这种方式至少提升了四分之一的工作效率。

The ongoing experiment gauges how employees navigate their workplace to find the spaces that work best for them. It has also become a tool for justifying the firm’s signature aesthetic. “A lot of our designers produce beautiful shapes,” he says. “But we need to be able to prove why those shapes are better than others. So we look at ways to compare, and that involves looking at spatial data.”
An effective workplace design, Blum suggests, is not one that optimizes all areas to the same standard, but one that accommodates the whole range of space and personal preferences. Yet in this way, he shares a fundamental assumption with the designers of the past: A space either helps or hinders the organization that uses it, and the designer’s challenge lies in finding out exactly which differences in a workspace will make a difference for the organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely known for shaping conditions of industrial labor in the early 20th century, but his work also had a significant impact on the development of the modern office. Scientific management, the field Taylor pioneered, improved productivity on factory floors by streamlining industrial processes according to insights gleaned from observation. By understanding the machine, worker, and factory as integrally connected components of enterprise, disciples of Taylorism established the basic tenets of the modern workplace as the meeting of people, place and equipment. Contemporaries of Taylor, such as the husband-and-wife team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, maximized worker productivity by reducing “waste time and motion”—as they called unnecessary movements in their many time-motion studies—from repetitive operations. Their techniques vastly improved output in an array of contexts like typing and brick-laying. But this approach had its limits: Workers can only move so fast, and they inevitably become fatigued.
One way past this hurdle was to shift the focus from workers to their environment, and to ask how space itself might alleviate stress and improve wellbeing. The installation of air conditioning in factories at the turn of the century was motivated by the promise of increased machine efficiency, but it was also, incidentally, an early instance of workplace design for wellness. The idea worked, and it was a similar logic that saw AC become commonplace in the modern office, where early studies claimed gains in typist productivity of nearly a quarter.


Image Courtesy of Steelcase

如今，与Blum同等地位的办公场所设计专员也同样关注办公环境与员工效率之间的关系，但是，现代工作方式不断地发展，那么设计的方法也应该不断变化。家具制造商Steelcase最近研发了一种数字物理基础设备，通过网络工作，很好地组织利用空间。Steelcase的产品经理Scott Sadler说：“目前位置，至少有一半的工作场所已成为摆设。”名为“Smart + Connected办公场所”的概念应运而生，其研发目标是减少实体办公场所和会议室的使用，同时也帮助企业管理者更好地了解其办公室的运用状况。办公场所安装有传感器、标识设备和相应家具，然后通过专用应用程序收集数据，员工只需要在自身方便的场所就能够与其他合作者进行一场会议讨论，这种程序甚至还能够让在不同地点办公的员工们进行多方会谈。“我们希望能够整合所有的数据，让员工最有效地进行办公。”Sadler如是说道。

Today’s workplace experts like Blum are similarly concentrating on the relationship between work environments and employee efficiency. As the nature of work continues to evolve, finding the best ways to support workers remains a moving target. The furniture manufacturer Steelcase recently developed a digital and physical infrastructure that helps organizations use their space more effectively as more work takes place online. According to Scott Sadler, category product manager at Steelcase, “nearly half of all workspace is simply not being used.” The “Smart + Connected Workplace,” as the new concept is called, aims to streamline employee access to workspace and meeting rooms, and help organizations understand how their space is working. Connected sensors, signage, and furniture provide space availability data on a proprietary app down to the minute. Workers can seamlessly set up meetings by finding an available space that meets their needs through the app, then inviting attendees. The app will even reserve meeting rooms on both ends of a teleconference between employees working in different offices. “We try to bring all that data together so it can be where it’s most effective—in the palm of the employee’s hand,” Sadler says.


Image Courtesy of Humanscale

这些触手可及的可能性激发了许多人的创意灵感，其中就有如Arjun Kaicker这样的办公场所设计顾问，他是Blum在扎哈事务所的合作伙伴，曾经还在福斯特事务所担任办公场所设计负责人。他说：“曾经的办公模式很难进行多方会谈，因此各个项目只能通过领导进行对接。如果你有20名员工，那么你就有相应的事务需要处理，可是现在，我们可以同时管理4000名员工。”Kaicker的策略证明，在这种员工数量巨大的办公模式中，办公场所仍然能够完美地适应不同的需求。“这极高地提升了客户体验，每个工作空间都与众不同，因此每位员工都能够找到适合自己的办公场所，这种模式前所未有。”

但是，并非所有的建筑师都在对此进行研究，对于布鲁克林建筑事务所Inaba Williams的负责人Jeffrey Inaba来说，他认为高效办公场所设计的关键并不在于充足的信息拉远，而是在于思维模式，例如建筑能够如何改善整个企业。那些能够呼应未来发展的商业空间，无论是快速增长还是下跌，这些空间都应该确保，办公建筑应当全面地服务于整个企业。“真正的建筑服务应当是了解客户的需求，建筑师应当思考可以在这个设计中加入哪些元素，而不是所谓的合不合适。”Inaba说。

数字化商业模式正在将众多需求引入办公场所，这是一种针对范围更广、并且更为真实的商业模式，因为这种模式的客户绝大多数来源于网络。“这里的人们意识到，随着世界逐步虚拟化，工作方式也更加灵活，建筑也应当更加适应未来的发展模式。这种方式之所以能够脱颖而出、形成特殊的空间，这是因为它们更加切合实际。”

高效工作场所的定义并非一成不变，对于Inaba来说，每个客户的需求各不相同，他认为：“在许多情况下，物理状态的改变往往具有针对性，设计需要解决的就是设计师需要了解的问题。”

These new, immediate possibilities motivate workplace consultants like Arjun Kaicker, a collaborator of Blum’s at ZHA and the former head of workplace design at Foster + Partners. “In the past it was incredibly difficult to have a sophisticated approach to dealing with people individually,” he explains, and so more often than not planners spoke only to leadership. Even then, he adds, “if you had even 20 people, you had too many computational variables. Now we can do it instantly for 4,000 people.” Kaicker’s method suggests a turn toward mass customization in which workspace supply can be perfectly tuned to demand. “It lets us bring the user in,” he says. “Every workstation is different, so we can help people find the spaces that are best for them to work in. That’s never been done before.”
But not all architects are crunching numbers in search of an answer. For Jeffrey Inaba, a principal of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Inaba Williams, the key to effective workplace design isn’t necessarily more information, but rather thinking strategically about what architecture can do for an organization as a whole. Spaces that can anticipate and respond to future changes in the business, such as rapid growth or downsizing, ensure that workplace architecture can effectively serve an organization in all scenarios. “The real architectural service is in thinking about how to question what the client needs,” Inaba says. “It’s the role of the architect to be projective about what can be introduced, rather than what is appropriate and obvious.”
Digital-first business models are loading other demands onto the workplace, which is called upon to be an outward-facing, real-world representation of a company that customers have mostly encountered online. “The people who are coming to us realize that as the world becomes more virtual, and work becomes more immaterial, architecture becomes more important to their business,” he says. “It’s a way for them to stand out, to produce spaces that are special because they are physical.”
The definition of an effective workplace is, as ever, constantly changing. And for Inaba, every client’s needs are different. “In many cases the turn to the physical is one that they’re making for the first time,” he says. “Design is about revealing the questions that a company needs to ask itself.”


Image Courtesy of Humanscale


Image Courtesy of Steelcase


Image © Naho Kubota


Image © Naho Kubota


Image © Naho Kubota


Image © Naho Kubota


Image © Iwan Baan


Image © Iwan Baan

这篇文章是“tech x interiors”的部分专栏，由设计工作室Studio O+A主要编辑。这个专栏于2018年4月发布于《都市杂志》上，讨论了关于工作场所的设计问题。

This article is part of the “tech x interiors” special section that was guest-edited by the design firm Studio O+A. The section, which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Metropolis Magazine, explores how technology is reshaping the workplace. You can find the full section online here.

           
出处：本文译自www.archdaily.com/，转载请注明出处。