I take the subway to the office every day and oftentimes I find myself standing there thinking about what the most efficient subway car interior would look like. I guess it’s the architect and designer in me, but I keep trying to rethink the seating arrangement.

My first thought is always that the perpendicular seats that shoot out into the middle of the train are a complete waste of space. If you’re tall (I’m 6’3”), they’re actually uncomfortable to sit in. Every time I do, I feel as if my femur is too long for the allotted space. 

One top of that, nobody ever wants to sit in the interior seat—primarily, I think, because they’re cumbersome to get in and out of when somebody is sitting beside you. So you end up with a countless number of cases where those benches are only half occupied.

But what’s really interesting about this thought exercise is that it can’t be done without also closely analyzing human behavior. Here’s what I’ve noticed here in Toronto.

People want to be as far away as possible from other people on the subway. It’s weird to sit beside someone unless you really have to. In fact, try this exercise: Walk onto a sparsely populated subway and sit directly beside somebody. I bet you that person will move and/or give you a dirty look.

What this means is that the end seats always fill up first. People don’t want middle seats, which, I’ve learned, is why they put grab poles in the middle of benches longer than 2 seats. They’re trying to simulate an end seat and make that middle seat feel less like it’s, well, in the middle. You get a pole in between you and the person next to you.

But before sitting in the middle seat, most people would rather stand. Standing is preferable to rubbing shoulders with someone, unless the subway train gets really busy, in which case people will start to sit anywhere. Typically people like to stand right beside the doors, because there’s a place to lean and it’s easy to get off when your stop comes. But this isn’t ideal from an onboarding and offboarding standpoint. It’s people in the way.

Of course, there are many others who have spent a lot more time than me thinking about this topic. A quick search revealed this Wired article talking about this very subject. And below is the layout that they recommend. The design is from the Transportation Research Board.

Their recommendation is to basically remove the seating around the middle doors, so that it’s easier for people to get on and off the train, and to stack airplane style seating towards both ends. In this scenario, the middle gets optimized for standing and the ends get optimized for sitting.

Now it’s your turn. Do you think this would be better or worse than what you have today in your city? Let me know in the comments below.

Yesterday I came across a post called, The Workplace of the Future, by venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz. In it, he references a book called, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, and talks about the changing nature of how and where we work.

What’s immediately interesting to think about is how recent the modern workplace really is:

The information worker is a relatively new concept. Peter Drucker coined the term in the 50s. By then companies had already developed new ways of housing information workers. The very first information workers were accountants hunched over “Bob Crachit” desks in the back rooms of factories. Booming railroad companies demanded more organization and created offices within the new skyscrapers along the Chicago skyline. With these new offices came stacks of paper and folios, and cabinets in which to file them. Then, the Mad Men wrought an era of typewriters and mahogany corner offices. Next, Bell Labs invented the suburban office park, moving offices from the city as part of post-war suburbanization and in the 70s, Herman Miller crafted the now-ubiquitous cubicle, which was called the “Action Office” when it launched. Oh, the irony.

It’s also interesting to think about how quickly things seem to be changing. Up until quite recently, everybody seemed to be singing the virtues of the open office plan. However, today, more and more companies are shying away from that kind of space planning:

In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

Today, the most radical changes are appearing in startup offices around the world and are being driven by a desire to have spaces that embody their unique corporate cultures. This means everything from cool brick-and-beam architecture to bike racks in the office to flexible rooms and spaces that encourage mobility throughout the day. And to further reinforce these cultures, companies are creating positions like Chief Culture Officer and Chief Vibe Officer.

But as I’ve said before on ATC, the other big shift is simply location and the return to cities. More and more startups, for example, are choosing San Francisco over Silicon Valley and it’s because the city is where young people want to live. It’s increasingly where the talent is. This has already brought about many changes in workplace design, but it likely bring about many more. 

Image: Airbnb’s San Francisco Office