Time lapse

On Sunday morning, my wife and two boys went for a mid morning coffee in downtown Galt.  It was a beautiful sunny morning with a lively breeze blowing along the river and choir music playing from the bell tower of the Presbyterian Church.  We often have coffee at Melville Café in the School of Architecture, a retrofitted building on the banks of the Grand River.  Across the hall from the café is an area dedicated to exhibitions of architecture that we make a point of strolling through with each exhibition.

The new exhibition included a screen, divided into four, playing a time-lapse video of four different scenes.  All four were very interesting; one was an overhead view of a cappuccino machine, but the one that caught my eye was an overhead view of work tables.  It reminded me of something you might find at an academic competition with people, sometimes in groups and sometimes as individuals, sitting down to collaborate, work, and prepare for presentations.  The comings and goings of the people with their computers and plans was fascinating.  Then it hit me, a tool like this would be invaluable for evaluating how people use their office space.

Imagine, before your company designs new office space, you have a time-lapse video made of how you use your existing space and it tells you some of the following details:

How do people use their offices?  Are the doors open or closed?  Do they eat in their office?  Do they have meetings in their office?  How much time is spent on the phone?

How are the boardrooms used?  How often are guests in the meeting rooms?  Do people use them for other tasks?  What percentage of the time are they in use?  What are the group sizes?  What equipment was used and how much time was used to set it up?

How often is the reception area used?  What is the average amount of time spent in the reception area?  How many people use it each day?  Who are the people using the reception area?

Your designer often collects this information from interviews, but it is not backed up with empirical data that could be used to design the most effective and efficient space.  The designer that has this sort of data could design space truly customized to the user and their business.

I had a thought that this could be done using a small tracking device that would track all the movements throughout the office and this would be transposed to a time-lapse floor layout.  This would be very useful, as well, but the video is so much more data rich.  Suppose your architect noticed in the video that the window blinds were down and after some number crunching found out that 73 percent of the people in offices had their blinds closed 87 percent of the time and during that same time had the office lights out.  Or 63 percent of the people in the office eat at their desk four or more times a week.  Would this affect the future design?  Would this raise interesting questions that need to be addressed in future real estate requirements?  I think so.