Design by Heskett John;

Author:Heskett, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, UK
Published: 2005-03-13T05:00:00+00:00

18. Expansion or concentration of the footprint?: American and Japanese bathrooms.

Within the framework of such general cultural differences, however, the home is still in most countries the one location where anyone can organize an environment to match his or her personal lifestyle and tastes, in a manner not available elsewhere. Although there are, of course, innumerable pressures to follow the fashions manifested in ‘style’ magazines, manufacturers’ advertising and retailers’ catalogues, the ability to personalize a space and inject it with meaning remains one of the major outlets for individual design decisions.

In contrast, an overwhelming majority of decisions on how workspaces are organized are made by managers and designers, and the people who work in them have to live with the consequences, with few possibilities for modification. As the twentieth century progressed, concepts of appropriate layouts for manufacturing plants and offices changed in response to changing perceptions of work and its management. With the rise of large corporations in the early part of the century, the ideas of Frederick W. Taylor and his successors in the Scientific Management movement were dominant. The ideas of Taylor and his followers were an effort to assert management control over work processes by imposing standardized procedures. He advocated finding ‘the one best way’ for any task and the main tools in organizing workers to fit this pattern were time-and-motion studies. Factory workers became subordinated to manufacturing sequences planned in every detail to maximize efficiency on the basis of mass production. Office workers sat at desks arrayed in uniform ranks, similarly organized and controlled in a strict hierarchy. In some bureaucratic systems, the position and size of desk and chair perceptibly changed with each increase in rank. In both factories and offices work processes were focused on the completion of highly organized functions for known problems and processes.

From the 1960s onwards, some companies began to experiment with looser systems of management, in which, within an overall emphasis on leadership rather than control, workers were encouraged to interact in teams and contribute more actively to processes. In some major Japanese companies, for example, worker contributions to manufacturing processes resulted in huge savings and improvements. The organization of factory spaces reflected this emphasis, with features such as areas of comfortable seating on the factory floor where workers could meet regularly and discuss their work. Such innovations made a substantial contribution to the competitive success of many Japanese companies. A parallel development in offices was in terms of a concept known as ‘office-landscaping’, in which layouts became more flexible, with widespread use of partitions to provide a blend of privacy and accessibility in the similar context of ideas about greater worker participation.

As with developments in all areas of design, this sequence in the evolution of ideas has been adopted erratically and all these stages of work organization can still be found, particularly when viewed on a global basis. Even with new technologies, old Taylorist concepts in their worst form can survive. Some companies providing services such as typing documentary

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