CREATING THE PRODUCTIVE WORKPLACE.

Edited by Derek Clements-Croome. London: E & FN Spon. 2000. [pounds]29.95

This essay collection appears at a time when the relationship between physical working environment and productivity is attracting much interest, especially in offices where most of the workforce is employed. The resolution of the debate could have huge economic consequences. To show conclusively that certain environmental features, such as higher -- or lower -- light levels could generate faster key strokes, fewer errors, happier staff would give design professionals a higher status in the world of work.

A more complete account of this fascinating, rapidly changing field is hard to imagine. Many disciplines are represented, from medicine, through social sciences, to design in its various manifestations. Quality varies, not surprisingly in a collection of over 20 papers drawn from so many quarters, both geographical and disciplinary. The best, for instance Leaman and Bordass's, Wyon's, and Kroner's papers are well structured, thoroughly referenced and highly quantitative. One or two tend to the aspirational and the woolly: Feng Shui and lay lines are not far away. A familiar methodological ghost flickers between the lines of many of the contributions: the Hawthorne studies, carried out in the US over 70 years ago, when the bottom fell out of deterministic environmental psychology because, in studies carefully conducted on the factory floor, the full complexity of the relationship between the physical and the social became apparent.

None the less, the tone is upbeat. These researchers know that they are on to something. Their investigations are generally more sophisticated because they are willing to accept that complexity as a condition of the conduct of their research. They know that they must take into account changing social conditions, and above all, the growing power of people at work to control their own environmental destiny. The methodological issues these papers raise are fascinating. Environmental research in the working environment is inherently interdisciplinary and systemic, i.e. it must take into account the interrelationship between the design of information technology, the design of the appropriate social organization and the design of the physical environment. Such research must take into account the micro -- and perhaps also the macro -- politics of the workplace. It must admit users, and their history and opinions, into the conduct of the research. This kind of research has to be openended, to take into account time, change and economics. No business, no building can be static for long. What is curious to me is that, given such complexity, standards of proof are sometimes demanded of the researchers working in this field, standards that would be more appropriate to natural science conducted in the laboratory than to the messy complexity of working life.

The office is changing as never before. Conventions about use of time and space inherited from mill and factory are being challenged. The relation between people and their working environment, given ubiquitous information technology, is now fluid. Perhaps it is as well that Clements-Croome's compilation doesn't try to give architects all the answers about how to design more productive workplaces. If it did, such answers would be certain to be wrong. Which doesn't mean that architects can afford to divorce themselves from the conduct of sys-tematic and imaginative enquiry into this fascinating area of design.