A Scientific Look At White-Collar Productivity

Brain Landscape: The Coexistence of Neuroscience and Architecture is the first book to serve as an intellectual bridge between architectural practice and neuroscience research.  John Paul Eberhard, founding President of the the nonprofit Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, argues that increased funding and the ability to think beyond the norm will lead to a better understanding of how scientific research can change how we design, illuminate, and build spaces.  In the excerpt below Eberhard looks at how architectural design may in the future increase white-collar worker productivity.

Frederick Winslow Taylor is sometimes called the father of scientific management-a system based on reducing factory work into small components that could be essentially learned easily and repeated continuously.  For example, a worker on an automobile assembly line might be assigned the job of installing the door handles on each automobile body that passes through his or her station.  With this form of specialization, the worker’s intelligence became defined as little more than the capacity to follow orders developed by the production manager.  There was no need to understand the larger process of which the component was a part.  The concept of productivity established by Taylor is still used to study working patterns of white-collar workers.

Workers in an office or laboratory are known as white-collar workers- symbolized by the fact that the males usually wear white shirts as contrasted to the blue shirts and overalls of a factory worker.  Attempts by efficiency experts to use Taylor’s methods to improve productivity in offices or laboratories have been largely unsuccessful.  The basic problem stems from the inability to clearly define productivity in the office environment because most work there is not repetitive.  Because each worker uses his or her brain to decide what to do next, solve an abstact problem, or plan a new strategy, there is no continuous series of events to be segmented.  Most office and lab work requires a different form of intelligence more advanced than that required of workers on an assembly line.

The neuroscience community is beginning to examine how specific changes in the physical and organizational environment can change the structure of the nervous system and improve mental performance.  Studies of how the working environment impacts the brain and the mind will want to include exploring the many ways that advanced electronic tools now used in offices and labs impact those processes associated with intelligence.  One could speculate that such research could help us understand how long-term memory produced by thinking and learning in more technologically sophisticated work environments increases the efficiency of mental functions.  That would seem to be a more important notion of productivity increases than the mechanistic methods of Taylor.