Apple's New Spaceship Campus Has One Flaw -- and It Hurts (bloomberg.com) 216
Mark Bergen, writing for Bloomberg: The centerpiece of Apple's new headquarters is a massive, ring-shaped office overflowing with panes of glass, a testament to the company's famed design-obsessed aesthetic. There's been one hiccup since it opened last year: Apple employees keep smacking into the glass. Surrounding the Cupertino, California-based building are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass. Inside are work spaces, dubbed "pods," also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That's resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents. Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building's design, the people said.
Sheeple (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sheeple (Score:5, Insightful)
When you design it like a mirror maze; yes.
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>You'd have a point about the trap-laden front hall being "dangerous" if every employee was banging into them multiple times a day
Who +1'd this dumbass
Re:Sheeple (Score:4, Funny)
Cool way to deal with your problems, lash out then cry it out.
Re:Sheeple (Score:5, Funny)
Not "somehow" -- there's a very specific mechanism: the walls are invisible.
The fix is easy enough, however -- just don't clean the class, and eventually the bloodstains will render the problem areas opaque.
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Another obvious solution would be ultrasonic sensors embedded in either the phones or the foreheads of the employees.
Re:Sheeple (Score:4, Funny)
Another obvious solution would be ultrasonic sensors embedded in either the phones or the foreheads of the employees.
Ultrasonic sensors might detract from the beauty of the building so clearly they would have to be embedded in the employee's forehead instead.
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Something even more simple. Have each employee wear a shock collar. When they get too close to a wall or door sensors trigger the collar.
Guaranteed they'll keep their heads up and looking where they're going after one or two incidents.
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Helmets!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bV7pM_HS70
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The fix is easy enough, however --
http://saynotoclearglass.com/ [saynotoclearglass.com]
Re:Sheeple (Score:5, Funny)
No they won't. The only blood will be on the floors where the panes have shattered and fallen down.
No, that's unlikely. I've seen Apple customers and those that work at the Apple stores. They mostly seem to be skinny little hipster types. They don't have enough mass to walk into safety glass and actually break it.
Now if they have a visiting delegation from Walmart, between the mass of the scooters and the passengers, the panes of glass are likely to fall out from the weight on the floor causing the base of the wall to warp.
Re:Sheeple (Score:5, Funny)
So... people don't pay attention to their surroundings and somehow it's the building's fault?
What did Reality say to the Apple employee?
You're holding it wrong.
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Re:Sheeple (Score:5, Insightful)
No the triumph of form over function is to blame. The issue in the name of meeting a certain style and aesthetic, Apple has built a building that is difficult to navigate for the humans its designed to house.
Art (visual art especially) can exist for its own sake, but Architecture *should* be functional because most spaces we design have a function and first and foremost they enable that function.
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Form over function (Score:3)
Thank you. I've said for a long time now that Apple's design philosophy is mostly driven by form over function. This makes their design pretty terrible functionally, which is diametrically opposed to the popular opinion that their design is great. Sure, aesthetically it is, but the functionality really suffers. The list of their design mistakes due to this wrong-headed design philosophy is long. Just off the top of my head:
- Flat square keys on keyboards, which makes it impossible for your fingers to center
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I work in a building with a lot of glass conference rooms and offices. The first few weeks it happened to a lot of people. I thought it was ridiculous, and then in a hurry I walked through what I thought was an open space with a cup of coffee. Not looking at my phone, I was focused on what was on the other side of the glass.
Re:Sheeple (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, some of these people are so glued to their phones that they would walk into a very obvious brick wall. For the people I view who are walking around oblivious to the world while checking their smartphone, they do seem to rely on peripheral vision and will stop just a foot or two short of bumping into stuff. Ie, the carpet pattern changed, they can see the base of the wall, etc. But if there was a clear glass wall that went to the floor without any wall base, I could easily see these people smacking into the glass.
Re:Sheeple (Score:4, Informative)
It's really an extension of what everyone knows - you can't walk and text. If you think driving and cellphones were bad, walking and texting is worse - people don't seem to think it's as dangerous, but it does lead to injuries and even deaths.
Yes, deaths - distracted pedestrians continually dart into traffic and get run over,. It's not usually a huge amount - most metropolitan areas typically see around 5-10 deaths per year. Injuries are usually much higher - because the people are walking into walls, street furniture (benches, planters, etc), lamp posts and other things on the sidewalk.
The end result is typically they walk a lot slower and often obstruct traffic - hence the jokes about "texting lanes" where they can keep to their slow pace while other traffic goes around them.
One wonders though if it would simply be faster to walk at a normal pace, arrive at your destination, then stop and do all your testing and crap in a safe spot. Seems like a risky thing to try to multitask walking.
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It was enough of an issue in Hawaii that it's now a $100 fine.
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Yes, there's bad architecture. A round glass pentagon. Pretty brilliant all right, just the sort of thing I'd expect from Jobs.
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So they're in a twisty maze of passages, all alike?
As always... (Score:3, Insightful)
As always with Apple it's form over function.
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Feel the pane!
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>Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building's design
What I don't understand is that this is how you have to adapt an iPhone to make it usable: bumper cases, regular cases, battery packs, all to protect the 'design' from being damaged, but necessary in the real world, but which inevitably compromise the 'look' of the product.
I don't think Apple understands that 'good design' is not simply 'go
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And once you add in the thickness of all these "add-on components", you might as well have just made the damn phone thicker and more robust... and doubled the battery capacity in the process.
At this point, I don't think Apple is the only one guilty of this. However, they are the trend-setter everyone else is following.
Cliche behavior? metaphor for priorities? (Score:2, Insightful)
Design over safety or function. Yep, that would be Apple.
So look up? (Score:2)
Sounds like the solution to this problem is to pull ones head out of his/her ass... erm phone while walking around.
Oh Apple. (Score:5, Funny)
Where's that lady with the big sledge hammer when you need her?
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It is obvious, isn't it?
Hentai artwork, of course!
Great pairing with the FDA story (Score:5, Funny)
The conjunction of this with the FDA Concussion Blood-test story is too delicious!
Someplace else I had read Apple had planned to place graphics on all the windows to prevent this sort of thing, which has now been moved to a "higher priority". How they could open before that was done, is beyond me...
Just further evidence that the physical world is more and more becoming like software, where you always want to avoid being in the early beta if possible.
Re:Great pairing with the FDA story (Score:4, Funny)
planned to place graphics on all the windows to prevent this sort of thing
A skull and crossbones comes to mind.
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I'm surprised they're taking that simple of an approach. I would expect a scenario like the following: Campus has a series of green and red LED inlays in the floors of every hallway and pod. Since employees stare down at their phones while walking, the floor LEDs are easily visible via peripheral vision.
Employee needs to travel from home pod to board/meeting room: programs coordinates into iPhone, which wirelessly communicates with the building AI which in turn lights up the green LEDs enroute to the de
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Just make a normal building and then require all employees wear AR headsets that turn your plain old building into an architectural masterpiece.
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Just make a normal building and then require all employees wear AR headsets that turn your plain old building into an architectural masterpiece.
Just make it an empty warehouse and do everything in VR.
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We could use something like that near the restrooms where I work. People are always almost bumping into each other going in and out and around tight corners to the main hallway.
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A translucent pissy Steve Jobs : "Walk Different, shitheads"
"The notes were removed because they detracted..." (Score:5, Insightful)
Classic Apple. Never let users or usability stand in the way of elegant design.
Re:"The notes were removed because they detracted. (Score:4, Interesting)
Until OSHA comes into play.
Re:"The notes were removed because they detracted. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, classic Apple would've gotten it right. Tog would've laughed this design out of the building, with a highlight reel showing people bonking into the glass walls, and how sensible visible elements on the glass fixed the problem.
I miss classic Apple.
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No, classic Apple would've gotten it right. ...
Are they the ones who made a one-button mouse? Would they extend that to building elements, like only one button out/inside the elevators?
Re:"The notes were removed because they detracted. (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple's mistake with the one-button mouse was sticking to a single button long after their original success had ingrained certain UI functionality into that single button. They could've added a second or even third button later on (as Windows did) without diminishing the benefit to UI simplicity that the single-button mouse had fostered. But by then they were well down their Form uber alles path, and stuck with the one-button mouse.
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I'm wondering if they hired new architectural integrity enforcers to prevent post-its and other ad-hoc field deviations from the new design or whether they just re-tasked existing HR shills for this job.
Root Cause Flaw (Score:5, Insightful)
People may be walking into glass, which indeed seems problematic, but that is only a symptom of the real flaw in Apple's approach.
And that critical design flaw is open plan seating. And Apple employees know it, and hate it.
https://apple.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
Collaboration and productivity are not improved in the slightest by this. They are, in fact, degraded:
http://www.bbc.com/capital/sto... [bbc.com]
The only thing that is increased, then, aside from tempers, are the number of beans the bean counters get to count. It is, after all, cheaper to pack sardines into a can than it is to individually wrap them.
Re:Root Cause Flaw (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes. There's many, many, oh-so-many reasons to /not/ use open seating. Many studies have been done on this. For your HPE - 'High Productivity Employees', it's awful. For some groups, like marketing or sales, it may actually be helpful, some of the time. For any workers that don't need to continually and constantly collaborate and only occasionally need to get marching orders or coordinate, they have these things called 'meetings' that occur in an open-seating layout called 'meeting rooms'.
Yet for a design concept that originated in the 70's, with as much consideration as the design of the liver-shaped coffee table, it is still held to be a sign of a future-forward progressive workplace - and I don't even know what that's /objectively/ even supposed to mean. Seriously. I've asked. No one can point to a metric that you'd want to go up that's actually been shown, even in a subjective questionnaire form (like, before and after "Rate your morale on a scale of 1-10").
No, what you get is design firms convincing management that this is the right thing to do, and how happy they'll feel, and how empowered and collaborative and cross-project-discipline-y their workplace will be, and management eventually swallows the kool-aid and starts believing it.
This is worlds away from IBM's actual workplace design studies in the 50's and 60's where they found out that employees are 0.13% (or something, don't quote me on that) more efficient when the walls are painted a sort of pale yellow, and thanks for that trend, jerks. At least that was scientifically determined. This is just pretty-to-look at junk that no CEO worth their salt should ever consider signing off on, unless they NEED to make their workplace less functional.
Re:Root Cause Flaw (Score:4, Informative)
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No, what you get is design firms convincing management that this is the right thing to do, and how happy they'll feel, and how empowered and collaborative and cross-project-discipline-y their workplace will be, and management eventually swallows the kool-aid and starts believing it.
Either that, or some managers in some companies want their buildings to be beautiful, without regard to the effect on the employees.
Management's goal should not be to have beautiful buildings. Their goal should be to make great products. Having established that goal, management should set up the building in a way that helps achieve that goal. If people are more productive and less distracted with individual offices and solid walls, then so be it.
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Many studies have been done on this.
Yes they have, and they have produced many mixed and confusing results. The key part about whether an open plan is a productivity killer or a business booster depends entirely on the nature of the work and the requirements for employee interactions.
The designs which make this work the best try to mimic the shared offices of past in an open way by segregating groups of people who by the nature of their work need to work together and yet provide quiet areas for those who need to get something done. You use co
Re:Root Cause Flaw (Score:5, Insightful)
...The only thing that is increased, then, aside from tempers, are the number of beans the bean counters get to count. It is, after all, cheaper to pack sardines into a can than it is to individually wrap them.
Uh, cheaper? Are you saying this one-of-a-kind-Jobs-dream building was cost-effective?
For what they paid, they could have probably constructed a normal building with individually wrapped luxury offices for every employee.
Next iphone to have rangefinder (Score:5, Funny)
Take a note from Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
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There is a joke here about Windows, but I can't seem to see it.
I saved that joke to my laptop desktop. Give me 5 minutes whilst I boot it up.
Re:Take a note from Microsoft (Score:4, Funny)
Windows: Apple's nemesis?
new product: iWatchout (Score:2)
The next best thing from Apple: iWatchout.
It can be an iPhone app which uses the rear camera facing forward, or maybe some new ranging sensor (IR, sonar, laser) on a future iPhone, which alerts the user when they are about to walk into a hard surface (wall, door, ...).
Can be combined with Apple Maps and GPS, to also alert if there are nearby cliffs or other geographical hazards.
Feature not a bug. (Score:4, Informative)
A building that punishes people for working for an amoral megacorp is exactly what Apple employees deserve.
Re:Feature not a bug. (Score:4, Interesting)
And the icing on the cake is that it's happening because they're using their iPhones in the same manner as the countless smartphone zombies their product helped spawn.
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Seems pretty simple to fix... (Score:2)
Make it dirty. (Score:3)
You do it for A, A does it for B, and B does it for you, allowing you all perfect deniability, "I didn't do this!"
Please release the videos (Score:2)
this will be a wake up call for the world.
I bet you... (Score:2, Funny)
no one saw that coming...
I'll show myself out now...
They're consistent at least (Score:4, Insightful)
"Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building's design, the people said."
Sure, you could make it FUNCTIONAL, but that's not what it's there for. It's there to look pretty, set standards, and impress folks for whom functionality is not a concern.
Design over functionality. *checks apple product line for the last decade* Yup. Pretty consistent.
Note, there is a thing called 'Good Design' that actually marries looks and functionality, but apple hasn't had a horse in that race for a good long time.
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The pinnacle of good functional design was the Pismo (PowerBook G3 series). It had dual removable battery bays, one of which could also hold an optical drive. You could use the device on battery power indefinitely if you had enough batteries. Thus, with three batteries, I consistently got more battery life with the Pismo than I do even with their curren
Indo (Score:2)
I'm relatively sure that this has nothing to do with the fact that California now has legal weed. Sixty percent sure.
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Wait for the glass to get covered in resin. Once the spaceship glass looks like a bong, no problem. Should take about a week in the executive suite. Longer in the parts where they actually work.
A simple solution ... (Score:2)
So Apple employees are to stupid for their house? (Score:2)
I mean seriously why do they even have their smartphones at work? Doesn't that go against virtually all sane rules on corporate security?
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don't know about your workplace but can't function without smartphone at mine. multi-factor authentication one reason, system alerts another, besides the meeting reminders and yes actual phone calls
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No. Unless somehow your corporate security requires a lot more than the Fortune 500 companies I've worked at, plus all of the smaller ones.
About the only places I've seen normally needing "no phones" security are locations requiring high security by the government or AV labs. Anything else for most companies is paranoid overreach and a grave breach of common sense. Anything else between "no phones" and "take pictures and recording of everything" can be dealt with by legal agreements and consequences.
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I mean seriously why do they even have their smartphones at work? Doesn't that go against virtually all sane rules on corporate security?
I can think of a lot of words that employees would use to describe a security policy banning smartphones.
Ironically, sane isn't one of them.
Useless article (Score:3)
Article is useless without pictures of the issue. Article only contains pictures of the outside of the building. I will assume they are just trolling.
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The key problem here is that employees are banned from photographing the inside of the building and Apple has kept the inside design a secret. It's hard to blame TFA for this.
If its unsafe file a complaint with OSHA (Score:2)
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Some things never change (Score:4, Informative)
The first time I saw this issue was when I was on a field trip in the 1970s. One of my classmates had one of the new handheld Mattel Football games and was playing it as we walked around.
We were in one of those museums that has glass walls dividing the major rooms, and he smacked into one at full waking pace. He ended up with a nasty bloody nose. He might even have broken his nose; I can't remember. However, one thing I have always remembered since then is to look up frequently if I'm walking around with some kind of device.
Your using it wrong (Score:2)
It's not a flaw (Score:4, Interesting)
But seriously, this reminds me (entirely from memory as I don't have it in front of me) of Tom Wolfe's book on modern architecture, where he describes the first boxy modern skyscrapers with floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall windows. Tenants would put lamps or trash cans, bookcases, anything in front of the windows to create a demarcation between the office and empty air 20+ floors up. The architects would come by and patiently remove the obstacles and chide the tenants for spoiling the look.
The point, as I recall, being, what looks cool and progressive doesn't necessarily wear well in daily use. Buildings should first be designed to be usable for their intended purpose. If you can also make them cool looking, that's a bonus.
But this is Apple, so looking cool and innovative probably *is* the intended purpose. With usability a bit further down the list.
All in on center out (Score:2)
Stuart Brand wrote a book, published back in 1994, about just this kind of thing, How Buildings Learn. [wikipedia.org] (also here [amazon.com])
This, from the Wikipedia summary of the accompanying BBC TV series, is relevant to the Apple UFO:
Brand is highly critical of the entire modernist approach to architecture. He fully rejects the "center out" approach of design, where a single person or group designs a building for others to use, in favor of an evolutionary approach where owners can change a building over time to meet their needs.
So when Apple employees attempt to, as Brand would say, "change a building.. to meet their needs," by sticking Post-its to the glass partitions, management undid that. Apple is all in on center out.
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Apple employees should have some decals like this made up: arrow icon [iconfinder.com]
Brand's "How Buildings Learn" is indeed an excellent book. One of the things he mentions is that surveys show that whenever anyone hires an architect to design a new building for an organization, everyone hates it and likes their old building better. In other words, the software UX community has recently reached parity with Architecture.
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Glass walls? Sure. (Score:2)
But the only way to have usable glass walls is to use overlays on them.
I'd link to examples, but Google removed the "view image" buttons and I don't want to force anyone to view pinterest pages.
Funny until it happens to you (Score:2)
Time for a Heads Up Display/Projection (Score:2)
On the assumption that the aesthetic is an exterior rather than interior concern....they could add some sort of projection onto the glass, so that people on the inside would recognize it (out of the corner of their eye I suppose) just before they walk into it. Rather than the projection being on all the time, it could be triggered by motion/heat or something.
This suggestion is slightly more tongue-in-cheek, than head-up-ass...but only slightly.
Not possible in Europe (Score:2)
Not a bug, a feature (Score:2)
They are all idiots! (Score:2)
And any of them that walk into more than one glass wall should be fired.
Throwing rock jokes.... (Score:2)
They should call Google (Score:2)
and get some of their surplus glass holes.
Not unlike Oslo Airport (Score:2)
I got caught in a situation pretty nearly exactly like this.
The Oslo airport customs section is (or at least was) designed with the typical Scandinavian ultra-minimalist glass partitions and bleached wood everywhere. Worse, they use minimalist signage as well - not even in WORDS but in the "universalist" iconography that someone believes 'everyone should be able to understand' but which is (to this pretty well-traveled American) baffling.
Finally, I'm sure to make it simpler for people dragging luggage, the
Work vs. Design (Score:2)
We are in the midst of moving to a new office. Our office is all engineering (75% software, 25% hardware). The big wigs of course hired some expensive consultants to help plan the new place.
Sure enough the presentation had a big heap of glass and open office space. The designs look amazing and futuristic in renderings for sure. Even the chair colors were chosen to "inspire".
It is ALL BS. Engineers need quiet caves to work in, nice quiet places to focus on work. Preferably with walls and doors that kee
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You would think that the bird-shaped smudges on the exterior windows would prevent bird strikes, too, but apparently not. :-)
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"I've decided it's okay to be rude to people holding phones.".
"But... that means you can be rude to everyone.
"Yes! Exactly!"