Design specialist Julia Cooper knows how to optimize space to enhance learning and connectedness among employees and students.
As director of consulting at Hok, a global design, architecture, engineering and planning firm, Cooper encourages organizations to create inclusive and neurodiverse spaces that strategically connect back to what the organization is trying to achieve.
Cooper’s presentation was part of UNMC’s Breakthrough Thinking Conference Series, which is intended to enhance UNMC’s strategic planning by sharing ideas that stimulate, inspire and broaden the thought process.
Watch the Breakthrough Thinking presentation with Julia Cooper online.
During her presentation, Cooper highlighted five scenarios and their impact on the workplace experience. Want to prioritize experiential and applied learning? Create open, collaborative and flexible workspaces that anticipate and maximize the varied schedules of faculty and staff. Want to embrace community and connection knowing students come to campus for memories that cannot be achieved online? Create more collaborative and social amenities in the workplace.
Cooper said it’s also important to adapt spaces for individuals diagnosed with such neurodivergent diagnoses as Autism Spectrum Disorder, Tourette syndrome or ADHD. “Their differences can be an extraordinary strength in the workplace,” she said, highlighting the creative talents of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, singer-songwriter Billie Eilish and entrepreneur Richard Branson.
To emphasize her point, she shared a quote from a student with autism who said: “We are freshwater fish in salt water. Put us in fresh water, and we function just fine. Put us in salt water, and we struggle to survive.”
As a result, it’s important to design spaces for individuals who are hypersensitive (prefer environments with simple patterns, light colors, orderly spaces and controlled stimuli), hyposensitive (need more stimuli to process information), both or somewhere in between (neurotypical).
“All spaces need to be designed with purpose and intent depending on the people occupying the space,” she said.
Cooper highlighted work done at the Stanford Center for Academic Medicine, which was purposely designed as a place for clinicians and researchers to work, rejuvenate and collaborate. The building, which sits next to an arboretum, includes a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces for large and small gatherings, natural light, few individual offices along the perimeter (so no one ‘owns’ the space by the window) and more work stations and amenities.
Cooper said there is a compelling human and business case to approach the design of workplaces to help address mindfulness, health, safety, wellbeing and inclusivity.
There is such a push for strengthening DEI, which I support, but special considerations need to also be discussed and included in the planning and design process for work space and patient areas. Protection of patient information while having an in person or phone conversation with a patient or a student with a personal issue requiring privacy often needs immediate access to a private space.
Open cubicles will make it difficult if not impossible to protect privacy.
Additionally an architect that specializes in design of healing spaces should lead this type of project. Read up on the work of Chicago architect, Paul
Alt.