We recently got to preview the newest addition to In DETAIL’s typological series, Work Environments: Spatial concepts, Usage strategies, Communications. It will be available next month (August 2011), and it is great for anyone who is interested in improving a user’s working conditions beyond the basic ergonomic and safety requirements. The first third of this volume deals with spatial organization, acoustics, lighting, and user satisfaction. The rest of the volume features projects from which the various concepts developed in the first third can be used to analyze them. I, personally, enjoyed the section on user satisfaction and how to measure it. After reading this section I speculated how researchers would control for the various confounding factors that exist in the uniqueness of each building presented in the rest of the book. This would not be an easy task by any means, but the necessity of such research is made clear throughout this volume.

Read more after the break.