The office is full of people today. Our attention is constantly given to a barrage of notifications, messages, endless scrolls and side conversations. We are conditioned to respond immediately, putting us in a state of constant distraction. And we’re getting more confused every year, three times more than in the pre-iPhone days, according to researchers.
While distraction is regularly framed as a matter of personal discipline, it is increasingly clear that the digital environment is thoroughly designed to divide, capture and hold our attention. However, if design can divide attention, it can also restore it. We are helpless in this attack on our cognitive capacity, and we can redesign our work environment to ease anxiety and improve focus.
How do we help people find the signal in all this noise? How do you plan to create a workplace that directs, protects, and restores attention?
As an architect with decades of experience in workplace and educational design, I have developed a framework called the Signal Stack that examines the three layers of a space – its stated purpose, the physical environment that supports it, and the policies that govern its use – to determine how to support better focus.
These strategies can be applied in new construction as well as in existing workplaces to reduce unnecessary cognitive load and make it easier for people to identify settings that best support the work they do. Let’s dig in.
The first question you should ask yourself is: Is this place clear? When the space does not send a clear behavioral signal, we burn the memory of whether we just know where to sit, how loud to speak or whether the task is appropriate. Is the lounge next to the elevator meant for focused work or informal conversation? Can someone make a video call at the communal table?
It seems simple, but the workplace must provide different settings for different modes of attention: concentrated individual work, collaborative project work, personal calls and virtual meetings, as well as places for recovery and social exchange.
Not every activity needs a separate space, but the workplace should avoid incompatible activities into the same setting. Determining the purpose means determining which work should be primarily supported and being willing to eliminate uses that compete with the space.
Once the purpose of the space is determined, the physical environment must make the purpose clearly legible. Understanding the behaviors we want to encourage, or discourage, provides a solid framework for making design decisions, and there are many proven strategies to help focus and restore attention.
Spaces for concentration should be positioned away from active circulation and conversation, for example, with sufficient acoustic and visual separation to limit competing demands on attention. A collaborative setting should make it easy to collect, present work, write and move. Social spaces include shared facilities and active routes, where conversation contributes energy to the workplace.
Incorporating spaces that support movement and quiet is also important. Physical movement can support ideation and divergent thinking, while stillness can support focus and convergent thinking.
This distinction must remain legible in the workplace. Clear routes, recognizable zones and reinforced decision points reduce the mental effort required to find the right setting and give users an intuitive sense of how to move space. The lighting, materials, acoustics, furniture and technology of the space should reinforce the intended activity rather than sending conflicting sensory cues.
The environment should also provide opportunities for attention to recover. Encouraging personalization and offering choices about how to occupy space can further reduce distraction by aligning people’s environments with their sensory, cognitive and emotional needs.
Then, what behavior is protected or prohibited? This last layer is the operational design aspect, which can be used to clearly encode the purpose of a space. For example, if we design a flexible meeting room with movable furniture and rolling whiteboards, office leaders should consider creating a reset policy. This policy can ensure that after each use the board returns to a predetermined configuration, thus preventing one team from stealing attention from the next. Policy picks up where environmental cues leave off.
In an age where attention is one of the scarcest resources in any organization, the next workplace model, the one we need most today, must be attention-literate, reducing our ability to find signals in a world that is too noisy.
Alex O’Briant is a principal at the architectural firm Steinberg Hart.