The Next Great Workplace Will Be Designed for Attention

The office today is filled with noise. Our attention is steadily given over to a barrage of notifications, messages, endless scrolls and side chats. We are conditioned to respond immediately, putting us in a state of perpetual distraction. And we’re becoming more distracted each year, three times more than in the pre-iPhone days, according to researchers.

While distraction is regularly framed as a matter of personal discipline, it is increasingly clear that digital environments have been thoroughly designed to divide, capture and retain our attention. But, if design can divide attention, it can also restore it. We are not helpless in this assault on our cognitive capacity, and we can redesign our work environments to ease anxiety and improve focus.

How do we help people find the signal in all this noise? How can design create workplaces that direct, protect, and restore attention?

As an architect with decades of experience in workplace and educational design, I have developed a framework called the Signal Stack that examines three layers of a space — its demonstrated purpose, the physical environment that supports it, and the policies governing its use — to determine how to better support focus.

These strategies can be deployed in new construction as well as across existing workplaces to reduce unnecessary cognitive load and make it easier for people to identify the setting that best supports the work at hand. Let’s dig in.

The first question you must ask yourself is: What is this space unambiguously for? When a space sends no clear behavioral signals, we burn working memory just figuring out where to sit, how loud to talk or what tasks are appropriate. Is the lounge beside the elevator intended for focused work or informal conversation? Can someone take a video call at a communal table?

It sounds simple, but a workplace should provide distinct settings for different modes of attention: concentrated individual work, collaborative project work, private calls and virtual meetings, as well as spaces for recovery and social exchange. 

Not every activity needs its own separate space, but a workplace should avoid forcing incompatible activities into the same setting. Defining the purpose means determining which mode of work a space should primarily support and being willing to exclude uses that compete with it.

Once the purpose of a space is defined, the physical environment should make that purpose clearly legible. Understanding which behaviors we want to encourage, or discourage, provides a solid framework for making design decisions, and there are many proven strategies to help focus and restore attention.

Spaces for concentration should be positioned away from active circulation and conversation, for example, with sufficient acoustic and visual separation to limit competing demands on attention. Collaborative settings should make it easy to gather, display work, write and move around. Social spaces belong near shared amenities and active routes, where conversation contributes to the energy of the workplace. 

Incorporating spaces that support both movement and stillness is also key. Physical movement can support ideation and divergent thinking, while stillness can support focus and convergent thinking.

These distinctions should remain legible across the workplace. Clear routes, recognizable zones and reinforced decision points can reduce the mental effort required to find the right setting and give users an intuitive sense of how to move through a space. Lighting, materials, acoustics, furniture and technology within such spaces should reinforce the intended activity rather than send conflicting sensory cues.

The environment should also provide opportunities for attention to recover. Encouraging personalization and providing choices in how to occupy a space can further reduce distraction by aligning people’s surroundings with their individual sensory, cognitive and emotional needs.

Then, what about behaviors that are protected or prohibited? This final layer is an aspect of operational design, which can be used to clearly codify the purpose of a space. For example, if we design a flexible meeting room with movable furniture and rolling whiteboards, office leaders should consider establishing a reset policy. Such a policy can ensure that after each use the space is returned to a predetermined configuration, thus keeping one team from stealing attention from the next. Policy picks up where environmental cues leave off.

In an era when attention is one of the scarcest resources in any organization, the next workplace model, the one we so desperately need right now, must be attention-literate, easing our ability to find a signal in a very noisy world.

Alex O’Briant is a principal at architecture firm Steinberg Hart.