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The Curse of the Modern Office
- rudenoise 10y agoIt's hard to respond to this piece. It makes some very clear observations that seem hard to counter. I've collected two other posts that seem to overlap http://rudenoise.uk/low-tech-minimal-computing.html http://rudenoise.uk/low-tech-minimal-computing.html Covering: Why the Office Needs a Typewriter Revolution http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/11/why-the-office-needs-a-typewriter-revolution.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/11/why-the-office-needs-... The Analog Spaces in Digital Companies http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-analog-spaces-in-digital-companies http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-analog-spaces... For all the work that gets done in offices there's a corresponding lack of self-awareness related to the impact that it has. As an Information Worker it seems to me that there isn't nearly enough diversity in approach.
- Tharkun 10y agoThe Typewriter Revolution article is a real beauty. It covers a nice history lesson as well as making some good points. One thing I take offense to is this statement: > Opening multiple windows on a computer screen doesn't work for back-and-forth cross-referencing of other material during authoring work, both because of slow visual navigation and because of the limited space on the computer screen. That's a problem that's easily solved with a half decent window manager.
- douche 10y agoOr with multiple monitors.
- gkya 10y agoThat one's covered in the article, wastes too much energy. I submitted this article yesterday and it went by with no upvotes because people probably thought it suggest we return to typewriters and paper piles, which it doesn't (I could've editorialised the title but guidelines say not to). It basically describes how energy inefficient today's offices are and how we can fix them.
- Retric 10y agoEdit: Driving just one mile further to work is significantly more energy than a huge monitor and nobody thinks a 11 mile commute is vastly worse than a 10 mile one. Modern monitors are very low energy usage. The lights above you likely use more power than two 27" LED monitors, especially as overhead lights are often on more than your ~25-50w monitors are. Note, monitor brightness does impact usage. PS: 27 inch 4k monitors start pushing 75+w, but that's higher end than the average office setup. ex: https://www.energystar.gov/productfinder/most-efficient/me-certified-computer-monitors/details/2266009 https://www.energystar.gov/productfinder/most-efficient/me-c...
- BoorishBears 10y agoMy main monitor at work is a 34" ultrawide, marginal increase in power consumption, but with Spectacles for OSX I'm able to use it as 2 monitors (I have secondary monitors but I hardly need to use them
- BugsBunnySan 10y agoFocus-Follows-Mouse for the win :) Which is even available on the crippled window manager that Windows has...
- thescriptkiddie 10y agoBut not on OSX! Yes, really. No, not even with 3rd party software.
- noelwelsh 10y agoHere you go: https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm
- thescriptkiddie 10y agoUnfortunately kwm cannot do real focus-follows-mouse, it can only raise windows to the top. That works okay if you're using tiling mode exclusively, but with floating windows it's unusable. https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm/issues/476 https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm/issues/476
- koenigdavidmj 10y agoSeems like there would be quite a few moments where it's hard to get to the menu bar without accidentally hitting another window.
- delish 10y agoi use amethyst, an xmonad-inspired wm with pretty good focus-follows-mouse. i tried kwm, and couldn't get the keybindings to register, nor get FFM to work. xmonad is better than all of them for what it's worth.
- thinkmassive 10y agoComing from i3, I tried Amethyst for a while when I had to use a Mac at my previous job. It seems like the best solution within the constraints of OS X, but it always seemed like enough of a hack that I ended up battling both it and the real window manager, so I ended up disabling it after a few months. The focus-follows-mouse never came close to working as expected for me. Fighting with window size, positioning, and focus is such a productivity killer. Now I'm glad to be back in a real tiling window manager.
- tonyarkles 10y agoYeah, I recently changed my main dev environment to be a 27" 2560x1440 monitor (Asus PB278, if anyone's curious) attached to a Mac Mini. There's enough space to happily keep a browser, evernote, and a terminal side-by-side (three vertical pillars); this has had very noticeable impacts on, if not my efficiency, at least my feeling of "not having to context switch". Everything's just right there and I just need to shift my eyes left and right.
- digler999 10y agoI'm rocking a 46" 4K tv at 4096x2160, using xmonad in split-screen mode so I have two viewable displays and 9 virtual displays. The hardest part was finding a 4K videocard with HDMI 2.0 output. I got the video card and TV for under $1k total and I'm very happy with it.
- tonyarkles 10y agoI'm oddly jealous! That sounds amazing! I'm just looking at the wall behind my monitor and scratching my chin... It's Black Friday...
- digler999 10y agoit works fine for software dev. there's some tearing when playing videos, not sure if it's the card (most likely) but it doesn't bother me at all. I dont do gaming, but I've heard the lag can get bad with tv's.
- crpatino 10y agoYour average office worker does not get decent screens. Even if the Windows default settings for the desktop have been kind of acceptable for many years, it does you little good if you are looking at it through a 9"-by-5" rectangle. Multiple monitors are beyond any discussion for most, even if we programmers have gotten used to those and find'em indispensable.
- slededit 10y agoAccountants often have 3 screens. Perfect for doing tax work - the form your working on, the customer's documents, and any relevant instructions/legal presidents for whatever they are doing. Of course different firms will vary.
- Retric 10y agoThe energy use numbers are kind of silly. Nuclear is ~20% of our electricity gen, so 1/4th of that is 1/20th or 5% of US electricity aka not really that big a deal. Energy wise getting to an office is generally far more expensive. Further they talk about BTU for heating ignoring heat pumps generally being over 100% efficient and running on electricity.
- brokenmachine 10y ago> heat pumps generally being over 100% efficient Que? How can anything be over 100% efficient?
- elric1v 10y agoBecause efficiency is measured by how much heat you get compared to the electricity you put in, and heat pumps cheat by moving heat in from outside. So you get more heat than you could from the energy input.
- omouse 10y agoIBM did a study on work spaces and how they affect productivity. It would be nice if universities did the same as a joint project of the Architecture and Computer Science departments but everyone seems to be interested in coding to get a job rather than studying these issues that are faced daily by millions of devs.
- sean_patel 10y agoTL;DR anyone? Like seriously. I ran this through the read-o-meter => http://niram.org/read/ http://niram.org/read/ and it says "Estimated reading time: 20 minutes, 38 seconds. Contains 4128 words". How many of you here actually read the entire article? Just curious, not trolling.
- Roboprog 10y agoNope, got about 1/3 to 1/2 in, and it started to seem repetitive. Good points, but needed editing.
- amitdeshwar 10y agoI read it. It's good focus practice (and I enjoy it).
- Retric 10y ago200 words per minute is kind of average, but for this kind of content it's easy to beat. I would practice a little as hitting 350-400+ as a fairly comfortable pace. It should be easy for most people and it really does add up. As to actual content I kind of skipped over 2/3rds of it as it's really repetitive.
- jwatte 10y agoWhy would you need to counter it? If it's right, it's right! The fact that US offices are designed to maximize return on real estate investment, not knowledge worker productivity, is well known. I wish our screens were better so there's not the continual battle between daylight and readability. E-ink for coding?
- pesenti 10y agoI live near downtown New York with a beautiful view of the financial district. Most of the towers stay fully illuminated throughout the night every night. Some turn off some floor at times but a majority do not (e.g all floors of the Goldman Sachs building stay constantly brightly illuminated). It always puzzles me, I can't help thinking that it's an obvious energy waste.
- clydethefrog 10y agoThey're just one big advertisement nowadays Money handlers, that's what these enormous buildings were for. And at this point in time with our use of a fiat currency, money is just a digital construct. So what is the need for having a physical space to house all of these people booting up their computers and networking and playing around with these numbers in a virtual environment? Perhaps at one time when computers were not a thing it would be necessary to collect those types into a consolidated area for the purpose of communication and organization, but we are no longer at the mercy of physical proximity being necessary for that. We continue to utilize these structures and maintain this method of worker placement and organization past their relevance, for seemingly no other reason than perpetuating an archetype of the "business building". Why else would there be a need to have these monuments to the conquerors of finance? Goldman Sachs maintains them as monuments so that we continue to look upon them as monuments, and the institutions they represent as being deserving of such reverence. They never turn off the lights because they can, not because they need to.
- paki123 10y agoThat was worded beautifully.
- unixhero 10y agoThis reminds me of an idiom I particular liked by Ralph Waldo Emmerson from Self Reliance "You see great works — statues, buildings, machines, books, and you feel belittled by them, put in your place, puny, unworthy. But you're looking at it all wrong. Their greatness awaits your judgment. Emerson wrote, "The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settled its claims to praise."
- decasteve 10y ago"There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings — and all the people sleeping in the slums." -- Buckminster Fuller
- mrfusion 10y agoI always figured large buildings would be way cheaper to heat because of the square cube law. I wonder why it says they're more energy instensive?
- threepipeproblm 10y agoDoes the article say that large buildings are more expensive to heat? It seemed to me its point was that other energy uses far exceed the costs of heating. Furthermore these scaling laws don't necessarily hold when there is a paradigm difference. E.g. you don't worry about scaling laws when comparing a building that can be lighted mostly (or entirely) from natural sources to one that can't; in fact the smaller scale is more efficient from this perspective.
- analog31 10y agoPerhaps more expensive to cool? I wonder if large office buildings have to be cooled year round.
- abcanthur 10y agoYes, typically large buildings are cooled year round, especially when they are cubic (not sure how this effects tall, skinny skyscrapers). Usually when you see "smoke" coming from the top of a building in the dead of winter, that's from the cooling units. Much heat does come electronics, lighting, humans, but there are still heating units to have precision control as temperature will not necessarily distribute evenly. There are, as one might guess, a lot of factors at play and no universal solutions. Certainly the pure form office buildings of the International Style are almost completely naïve to these considerations. The biggest tragedy is the air controlled paradigm of hvac. Air is so not dense relative to water! Doesn't hold energy and very hard to push around (push a column of air up 20, 50, 100 stories? Not happening). This is directly related to the early success of the Carrier ac company.
- Someone 10y agoHeating isn't the only thing using energy. "Many office buildings had window accomodating H-, T-, and L-shaped footprints to encourage natural lighting, ventilation, and cooling" All that is mechanical in big square blobs. Also, at the scale of large office buildings, and given that those more slender buildings would have an optimal orientation, I am not sure building shape matters that much in heating costs. The article also states "While heating was the main energy use in pre-1950s office buildings, today cooling, lighting and electronic equipment (all operated by electricity), use 70% of all energy on-site.", but that's not a strong argument, as slender buildings would have the electronic equipment, too.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Animats 10y agoWhy haven't we hit "peak office workers" yet? The US hit peak factory workers in 1979. We have all this information technology and yet we still have all these people in offices.
- draw_down 10y agoThe article goes into some detail as to why this may not result in an improvement in sustainability.
- comicjk 10y ago> For one thing, supporters of the sustainable information society ignore the fact that we have moved most of our manufacturing industries (and our waste) to low wage countries. This is a common myth about the US economy, probably spread because it's useful to both the right and the left. In fact, the US manufacturing sector produces $6.2 trillion/year, exports $1.1 trillion, and imports $1.9 trillion. So about 11% of our net manufacturing "footprint" is overseas.