Emotional intelligence is cultivated through people's training and practice. Space affects the state in which those capacities operate: acoustic and visual privacy and places for informal encounters make possible the conversations that elsewhere are avoided.
Space and the relational climate
Informal places – the kitchen, a lounge area, a corridor with something to pause at for a moment – are where relationships are built outside the hierarchical structure. The presence or absence of these spaces shapes the organisational climate in a concrete way: an office made up entirely of workstations and formal meeting rooms leaves no room for lateral exchange, for the kind of conversation that has no agenda. Community Based Design arises precisely from this observation: the plaza, the street, the places of unplanned encounter are design ingredients, not decoration.
Privacy and difficult conversations
Not every conversation belongs in an open space. Direct feedback, a tension to clear up, a moment of personal difficulty: these exchanges call for a place that provides acoustic and visual privacy. In many offices those places do not exist – or they exist only as large meeting rooms, which expose whoever uses them anyway. Small rooms, enclosed areas, spaces that reduce acoustic unpredictability: these are work settings that make possible what without them is postponed or avoided.
How we measure it
The survey of the typical day returns precise information on how and where interactions happen: how many encounters are formal, how many informal, how many conversations require privacy. From there we design the work settings in the right proportion – meeting places, break areas, protected spaces – without assuming a distribution in advance.