#on this episode of how much symbolism can i cram into a drawing

[starlight-eclipsed]

Tri Force Hero

[twdmusicboxmystery]

FTWD 7x11: Ofelia

Okay, how did everyone like this episode of Fear? I liked it a lot. I thought it was crammed full of interesting themes and symbolism. Today I’ll talk about the basics of the plot and the biggest things that jumped out at me. Tomorrow, I’ll give you some of my fellow theorists’ thoughts, especially as concerns Daniel’s memory problems. (Bet you can’t guess where we’ll go with that. ;D) And after that, I’ll go over some musings I had about the bird cage symbolism.

***As always, spoilers abound below for the episode. Don’t read until you’ve watched!***

So, the things that jumped out at me most from this episode were the boat symbol (lots of those), Daniel’s memory problems, and the bird cages.

So, we start with Luciana playing a memory game with Daniel. It took me a few scenes to realize this, but I think Daniel’s memory problems are probably a foreshadow or template of Beth’s. It’s funny, because he first started having these memory problems back in S6, which because of CoVid was more than a year ago. We hadn’t figured out as much about Beth’s template then as we have now. So, I totally didn’t draw a correlation between the two.

But this entire episode was full of Daniel trying to recover memories and clarity about what his life was before, and what it is now. And there were tons of lines about how, “she’s gone,” “she left,” and “she’s no longer here.” Along with Daniel constantly insisting, “She’s alive.” I was just side-eyeing pretty much every line super hard.

At the beginning, they even had a thing where Lucy didn’t specifically tell him she was dead. She just said, “she left” and Daniel took that to mean that she’s alive.

So, a couple of things here. I think Daniel represents both Beth and Daryl in various ways here. The memory stuff is mostly how he’s like Beth, or how we believe Beth will be when we see her again. Although, we have talked about possible memory problems for Daryl when it comes to the Leah situation. And memory might not be the right word. More like just problems with the perception of reality.

But insofar as Daniel is searching for the lost girl, he represents Daryl. You may wonder how this can be a template, since Ofelia really is dead. I think Daniel is a mirror, or at times, anti-parallel to Daniel. Where Daniel actually is having memory problems, Daryl isn’t. Not in a literal way. Where Ofelia really is dead, Beth won’t be. That sort of thing.

They give us this missing woman template a lot, and they’ve even done it various ways already in Fear. In 7a, we had John looking for the missing body of one of Teddy’s victims. So in that scenario, he also knew she was dead, but just hadn’t been able to find her body. But it still had heavy parallels to Daryl searching for Beth.

You could also argue that this aspect of the symbolism is a callback to S5. Because Daryl said “she is alive” several time sin 5x01. It was one of the first things we heard. So, as I always say, this functions as both a callback and a foreshadow.

The other really interesting thing is that, at the end, the showrunner said Daniel’s memory loss was due to PTSD, not old age or Alzheimer’s. I would have assumed this condition was irreversible. But, it’s not. If he can work through the PTSD, and put his mind to rest, this memory condition will probably go away on it’s own. Yet another way to parallel it to what we think will happen with Beth.

In terms of what happens, Luci, Wes, and Daniel are taken captive by Arlo’s people. They’re taken not his home base and held captive.

This is where the next interesting symbolism happens: the boats. This is some kind of boat yard. Arlo’s people are living aboard a series of boats, connected by raised bridges or catwalks. Walkers are stumbling around beneath them.

So, once again, we’ve seen boat symbolism since at least S4. We are constantly seeing things symbolic of the ocean, boats on the ocean, sailors, the beach, etc. And now, with this spinoff news of Daryl going to Europe, I can’t help but wonder if this is the storyline they’ve been pointing to all along.

The setup in the boatyard also reminded me, in a weird way, of the prison. Each of the boats is like a cell, just spaced farther apart, with catwalks in between.

But the catwalks themselves also function as bridges. I didn’t think of that until Daniel dropped one of the planks, trapping Luci and Wes on the ship he thought was the Abigail. (If you don’t remember that reference, it’s from a much earlier season of Fear. There was a boat by that name that figured heavily in the plot, and Daniel associates it with Ofelia, his daughter.)

Arlo puts Wes in a bird cage, and Wes refuses to give him information, saying he’ll die first. We’ve seen a lot of bird references in the show lately. Even as recently as Carver of the Reapers saying that Daryl talking was him “chirping.” This feels similar. Wes refused to “chirp,” so Arlo was going to kill him.

I won’t say much more about the bird cages, because I’ll do a deep dive into them in a few days.

I was a little surprised that they killed Arlo so casually. Not shocked or anything, but surprised. However, especially with Charlie and Ali—and then stuff that happens in next week’s episode—they do seem to be doing away with a lot of their characters. Not super mainstream ones, but still.

Before he dies, Arno lets out some interesting info. He asks if they know what’s coming. When Luci pushes him to tell her, he says someone is letting the radioactive walkers out of the crater. He doesn’t know who. And if they keep doing it, everyone is gonna die from the radiation those walkers are giving off.

So, interesting new tidbit. We don’t know who’s doing that, but I’m assuming we’ll find out at some point.

In the end, Daniel seems to accept that Ofelia really is dead. But unfortunately, Luci decides to lie to him and tell him she’s in the tower so Daniel will help them take down Strand. It’s very sad. I feel bad for Daniel. And this will probably irrevocably wreck his and Luci’s relationship.

Before I wrap up for today, let’s talk about the use of “weapons” as a symbol in this episode. They use that term to refer to two different things. The first is a weapons cache that Dwight apparently found. Most of the rest of the group (not Luci, Wes and Daniel) go to retrieve them, and that happens off screen.

I think having them do this is mostly thematic. On a symbolic level, this episode was about gathering the weapons, of various kinds, that the group needs to take down Strand. So, most of the group was searching for literal weapons, which makes the theme cohesive.

We also saw that Arlo’s group had weapons, but no bullets. Which makes their guns useless, except perhaps as clubs. So, you can see the theme there. They have weapons, but they’re missing the parts that make them functional. And without those, they can’t do much with them.

The final weapon they mention is Daniel himself. They keep saying he knows Strand better than anyone, and may be the person who will finally be able to get ahead of Strand mentally and take him down.

This is very much how we think Beth will function in the CRM war. I’ve always said this. It’s not that Beth his superwoman and will single handedly win the war and it’s gonna become the Beth show. Not at all. The entire group will have to work together against the CRM, and their efforts will more than likely be spearheaded by Rick and Daryl. But Beth will have some sort of information, probably from being on the inside so long, something that, without it, TF wouldn’t have been able to win.

It's very similar here with Daniel. He doesn’t even have some big piece of information, yet. It’s more like he knows Strand so well, that once he gets there and starts interacting with him, he’ll figure it out, in ways no one else in the group could have. And certainly Daniel can’t take Strand down by himself. The entire group will have to work together for that. But Daniel will be pivotal. Because of what he knows, up in that currently confused mind of his, he will become their secret weapon.

And we’ve always thought that’s what Beth will be as well. So, this is all just to say that I’m seeing major Beth parallels here, but it’s to stuff that’s been foreshadowed, rather than stuff we’ve already seen. So, I will be watching what they do with Daniel for the rest of the season and moving forward with great interest.

What did everyone else think of the episode?

[murdereraisuha]

Classpecting TWST: Savanaclaw

Time to classpect the dorm that deserved better writing-wise. I’m gonna start tagging these “twst analysis” now too cause I am basically using the classpect stuff as a vehicle for getting a better understanding of the characters

Spoilers for chapter 2 and some of the trio’s personal stories. No knowledge of Homestuck required to read.

[Image description: A banner containing a picture of Leona, the symbol for the hope aspect, and the words “Leona Kingscholar: Prince of Hope”]

Before we get to the reasoning, I just want to say, Leona I am so sorry you have to share a classpect with Eridan. Okay now I’ll hand the mic to past me.

Throughout his personal stories, we see that Leona is fine with resorting to underhanded tactics, but he specifically values cleverness and creative use of resources. Leona looks down on those who don’t exhibit those things (ex. the Savanaclaw students in Leona’s dorm uniform story who tried to beat up Jack using sheer numbers).

Leona tends to only expend effort on things that benefit him in some way.

Leona is a powerful and intelligent magic user; he could have easily graduated already if he wanted to, but it seems he doesn’t want to.

Despite Leona’s strengths, those around him criticized him and constantly compared him to his brother due to Leona being the 2nd born prince. No matter what he did, he could not sway those opinions. He could never become number 1.

Because of this, he developed the belief that life isn’t fair and he gives up on things rather easily.

Based on this, I have 3 aspects in mind: rage, hope, and doom.

Rage and hope go hand in hand as opposites: rage is negative emotions, rejection, and doubt, while hope is positive emotions, acceptance, and ideals. For Leona, his story seems to be about him having given up on his hope and dreams of ever succeeding. In its place he has become quick to deem efforts worthless. He acts antagonistic to people like Vil and Malleus, and he seems to disapprove of some of Jack’s honorable ideals. All of these things connect to the parts of rage/hope.

Doom is also a possibility, as it represents negativity, decay, and limits. It is the opposite to life, the aspect that I picked for Kalim. Therefore, I think doom is plausible since Leona shows the opposite side to the luxuries enjoyed by Kalim and Farena as first borns.

Now for classes. I don’t think Leona does much stealing, he doesn’t suffer from indecision, he doesn’t put up any masks, and he’s not a very healing focused person. I think that narrows it down to witch, heir, mage, prince, and bard.

If it’s prince or bard it would have to be hope, in which case prince of hope fits Leona best due to his destruction of hope being focused more than just happening naturally. Though Leona has suffered, it seems to have more hampered his potential than gave him useful knowledge so now I’m kicking out mage. Heir seems to fit best if it’s as a heir of rage. Finally, I’m also kicking out witch since he he doesn’t do much manipulation of any of the 3 aspects.

Between prince of hope and heir of rage... it’s prince of hope. Since Leona says that nothing he did could sway people’s negative opinion of him, we can assume that Leona had hope earlier in his life that he could change those opinions. He did stuff like studying and improving his magic until he finally realized that that wasn’t changing his image at all. Rather than preserve his hope, he choose to destroy it, making his class the active destroyer class, prince.

In chapter 2, he rallies Ruggie the rest of his dorm against Diasomnia, using their hopes as a tool for destroying the other teams. In 2-24 Leona then tries to destroy their hopes once he deems their plan useless. At one point he says 「じゃあ本当のことを教えてやるよ」, translated by Shel_BB on youtube as “Let me give you a dose of reality.” This and the other things he says this episode really connect to the hope/rage themes of reality vs fantasy and stop vs go. Therefore, quite ironically since he is an actual prince, Leona's classpect seems to be a prince of hope.

[Image description: A banner containing a picture of Ruggie, the symbol for the Life aspect, and the words “Ruggie Bucchi: Rogue of Life”]

Ruggie grew up in a poor environment with food insecurity. Many of his clothes are hand-me-downs, he’s fine with eating odd things like dandelions, and before holiday break he raids the cafeteria for food to bring back for the others in his town.

Ruggie’s official hobby is part-time jobs. From working at Mostro Lounge to selling mandrakes, he’s really focused on earning money however he can.

His skillset, which includes pickpocketing and haggling, lets Ruggie pull off plenty of clever and underhanded tricks.

However, like Leona, Ruggie still has standards: in one of his ceremony robe voice lines, he says that he prefers his lot in life over that of a spoiled, rich person without any problems. 

His dorm uniform personal story, where he teams up with Trein’s cat to get magic history help and catch rats, is about using the power of others instead of relying solely on himself.

There were 3 paragraphs of stuff here that I deleted because I was getting absolutely nowhere. I didn’t expect Ruggie to be this hard.

Like, Ruggie's problems kinda seem to stem from just poverty and Leona being an asshole. Well, hm, actually if we combine the moral of his dorm uniform story and Ruggie acting like Leona’s maid, perhaps Ruggie’s problem is something like he keeps taking on burdens? Out of everyone who lives in his slums, he’s likely the only one going to a prestigious school like NRC. He’s likely well-known there because of that and him bringing back food a lot. Are Ruggie’s ambitions for a good job not only his own ambitions, but that of the whole community? I’ve always been a bit confused about why Ruggie helps Leona out outside of the magift tournament stuff. Is he... so used to having to help others and constantly take on jobs that his standards for what’s reasonable work are gone? I just went through the chats and in Jack’s one with Ruggie, Jack is telling him about having to find something to draw for a homework assignment and Ruggie immediately offers to go get his warthog piggy bank. Bruh?? Doesn’t that have your money? Why are you just lending it out like that????

Alright, because Ruggie is a guy who needs to chill and have some me-time, I’m narrowing his class down to rogue, maid, or knight. For aspects, I’m thinking life (energy & luxury), time (action & death), or blood (community & responsibility).

On second thought, I’m kicking out maid and blood. Rogue & knight and life & time seem to fit Ruggie better. And now my best guess is rogue of life. First, he obviously fits the stealing aspect of the class through his skill at stealing. Like how a rogue redistributes things, Ruggie obtains money/food to redistribute to the others in the slums. He also injured the people in chapter 2, basically taking life from them, which resulted in Savanaclaw's chances of winning the tournament getting stronger. For the tendency of rogues to have a hard time coping with having their aspect, Ruggie has a hard time accepting luxury/relaxation time. He funnels all his resources into efficient causes and his community. Also, in Jack’s dorm outfit personal story where Jack tries to help him out with stuff, Ruggie is distrustful of him and goes out of his way to avoid him.

I didn’t have any sort of eureka moment with this one like I had with the twins, so I’m still unsure about it. However, considering that TWST characters obviously weren’t meant to get crammed into the classpect system, it makes sense that some might not fit perfectly. So, with what I do have, I think that Ruggie is a rogue of life.

[Image description: A banner containing a picture of Jack Howl, the symbol for the mind aspect, and the words “Jack Howl: Page of Mind”]

Jack values honor, strength, and hard work. He believes that people should accomplish things through their own efforts rather than lowly tricks.

Therefore, Jack disapproves of Leona and Ruggie's method of doing things. 

In contrast to how Leona and Ruggie use others, Jack sometimes refuses help, like in chapter 2 when he claims he can handle his dorm by himself.

Jack is quite intelligent and insightful, as shown by his comments throughout chapter 3 and his scary outfit personal story.

Jack respects social/group hierarchies and takes care not to disturb order, as shown in his dorm outfit personal story.

Also in his dorm outfit personal story, Jack says that he wants to become someone with a single true purpose.

So, I'm already kind of stumped. He doesn't have any big moments in the spotlight during the main story, so there's not much to go off of there. 

We have to start somewhere though. So, first off, I’ll eliminate the destruction classes and theft since he doesn’t do much of either. I’ll also eliminate the knowledge classes since I don’t think he holds any special knowledge of anything.

For potential aspects, after eliminating the ones that seem mostly irrelevant to him, I’m left with mind, heart, hope, rage, or blood. The 2 that particularly stick out to me are mind and heart.

Mind is the aspect of logic, unbiasedness, morality, and blending in. For Jack, his strong focus on justice even when it means going against someone he once admired seems very mind-like. His care in not stepping out of line in social situations also relates to blending in. Of course, we should still keep mind’s opposite, heart, in consideration.

Now that I’m pretty confident his aspect is mind or heart, we’re left with 12 possible classpects. I still can’t narrow it down well, let’s go back to Jack’s traits.

What challenges does he face or have to overcome? In the main story, the problem he faces is trying to correct the injustice in his dorm by himself. In his dorm outfit story, the problem he faces is being over zealous about helping Ruggie. Wait, actually, that’s not right. Though that is a problem, it seems like the main growth/realization for Jack is about his motivation for helping Ruggie. When questioned by Ruggie in part 1, he mainly cites the group hierarchy as the reasons for his actions. However, later on, Deuce deduces (haha) that Jack looks up to Ruggie like a big brother. Though Jack denies it, at the end of the story he asks if Ruggie would let him call him big bro.

It’s like he is concerned about justice and social harmony (mind stuff), but in reality he does stuff according to his impulses and emotions (heart stuff). This doesn’t feel like a prince/bard situation though, it isn’t dysfunctional or destructive enough for that. I thought that the pages of the cast might be Epel and/or Sebek, but it seems that Jack may be a page.

Pages, the passive exploitation class, are characterized by a deficit in their aspect that they try to hide and overcome. Like how Jack takes his service of Ruggie too far, pages often overshoot in their efforts to correct their weakness. However, as they grow and learn from their mistakes, pages become masters of their aspect, like in Jack’s scary outfit story where he starts out with a bad idea then at the end develops it into a sound plan to scare the tourists. That also fits well with mind, since smoke and mirrors is another big part of that aspect.

Therefore, with how well this class seems to fit with Jack’s actions and motivations, I think that he is probably a page of mind.

[harlanrwiley89]

Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be (Ep. 358 Rebroadcast)

Feeling stressed from working in a noisy open office? Tell your boss that working from home increases worker productivity by 13 percent! (Photo: MaxPixel)

It began as a post-war dream for a more collaborative and egalitarian workplace. It has evolved into a nightmare of noise and discomfort. Can the open office be saved, or should we all just be working from home?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*     *     *

Hey, are you at work right now? And do you work in an office? Have you ever worked in an office? If you have, there’s a good chance it was an open office, at least to some degree. The open office design has been around for decades, in a variety of forms. If you’re a cynic, you might think an open office is all about cramming the maximum number of employees into the minimum amount of real estate. But you could also imagine that an open office produces better interaction and more collaboration. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if this were true? That’s what these people wanted to learn.

Ethan BERNSTEIN: I’m Ethan Bernstein, I’m an associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.

Stephen TURBAN: My name is Stephen Turban. I am a recent graduate of Harvard College and I currently work for a global management consultancy.

Turban has since moved on from his consulting job. Anyway, he and Bernstein had just co-authored a paper called “The Impact of the Open Workspace on Human Collaboration.”

TURBAN: I don’t think I realized how much anger there was against open offices until the research was published and I was contacted by a number of friends and colleagues about their open offices and their deep, deep emotional scarring.

BERNSTEIN: There’s certainly a population of people out there who hate — I think that’s perhaps even not strong enough—

DUBNER: Not strong enough, agreed. But proceed please.

BERNSTEIN: People find it impossible to get work done. They find it demoralizing.

TURBAN: Also the lack of privacy, and the feeling that they’re being watched by others.

BERNSTEIN: Privacy tends to give us license to be more experimental, to potentially find opportunities for continuous improvement, to avoid distractions that might take us away from the focus we have on our work.

TURBAN: Ethan is really, I would say, the king of privacy.

BERNSTEIN: My research over time has been about the increasingly transparent workplace and its impact on human behavior and therefore performance. Over time, I’ve gotten asked the question, “What about the open office? How does it impact the way in which people work and collaborate?” I haven’t had an empirical answer.

In search of an empirical answer, Bernstein and Turban began a study of two Fortune 500 companies that were converting from cubicles to open offices. Sure, the downsides of an open office are obvious: the lack of privacy; having to overhear everything your coworkers say. But what if the downsides are offset by a grand flowering of collaboration and communication and idea-generation? What if the open office is in fact a brilliant concept that we’ve all been falsely maligning?

*     *     *

The office is such a quintessential emblem of modern society that it may seem it’s been around forever. But of course it hasn’t.

Nikil SAVAL: The economy of the United States was based on farming and it was based on manufacturing. The office was almost an afterthought.

That’s Nikil Saval, the author of a book called Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.

SAVAL: People thought, “Well, offices are essentially paperwork factories. So we should just sort of array them in an assembly-line sort of formation.”

This meant a big room filled with long rows of desks and, scattered on the periphery, private offices for the managers. This factory model, which got its start in the late 19th century, came to be known as the American plan. And it was standard office form for decades, at least in the U.S. But then, in the middle of the twentieth century, in Germany:

SAVAL: There were two brothers, the Schnelle brothers, who began to wonder about the nature of the American plan. There was a sense that this was arbitrary, and there was no real reason to lay out an office in this way.

In 1958, Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle created the Quickborner consulting group with the idea of bringing some intentionality to modern office design.

SAVAL: And one of the ideas that came to them was that an office is not like a factory, it’s actually a different kind of workplace. And it requires its own sort of system. Maybe there isn’t a reason to have desks in rows. Maybe there isn’t a reason for people to have private offices at all, if essentially the office is not about producing things but it’s about producing ideas and about producing communication among different people. And so over time they pioneered a concept that they called the burolandschaft, or “office landscape.” And it was essentially the first truly open plan office.

The idea was to create an office that was more collaborative and more egalitarian.

SAVAL: It looks extremely chaotic. You’d just have desks in clusters and they just seem to be arranged in a pretty haphazard form. But, in fact, there was rigorous planning around it in a way that would facilitate communication and the flow of people and ideas. And it eventually made its way to England and the United States, and it was considered an incredible breakthrough.

A breakthrough perhaps — but the earliest open offices drew complaints similar to the ones we hear today. Lots of complaints.

SAVAL: By not instituting a barrier between people, by not having doors, by not having any way of controlling the way sound traveled in the office, it stopped facilitating the thing it was supposed to facilitate, which was communication, because it became harder to communicate in an office environment where phones were ringing off the hook, where you could hear typewriters across the room, and things like that. It wasn’t actually the utopian space that it promised to be. In fact, it was deeply debilitating in some ways for the kind of work that people wanted to do.

Meanwhile, there was an American named Robert Propst working for the Herman Miller furniture company, in Michigan.

SAVAL: He was not himself trained as a designer. He was sort of like a freelance thinker.

Propst was intrigued by the “office landscape” idea — its openness and egalitarian aspirations — but he also appreciated its practical shortcomings.

SAVAL: And he decided to turn to experts — to anthropologists, to social psychologists, to people of that nature.

After some research, Propst came to the conclusion that individuals are — well, they’re individuals. And they need more control over their workspace. He and the designer George Nelson came up with a new design in which each office worker would be surrounded by a suite of objects to help them work better. In 1964, Herman Miller debuted the “Action Office.”

SAVAL: There was a standing desk, a regular desk that you sat at, and a telephone booth.

Design critics loved the Action Office.

SAVAL: It looked incredible, but it was very expensive and very few managers wanted to spend this kind of money on their employees. So they went back to the drawing board and they tried to come up with something cheaper.

In 1968, Herman Miller released the Action Office 2.

SAVAL: And it was this three-walled space: these fabric-wrapped walls that were angled, and they were meant to enclose a suite of furniture. And it was meant to mitigate the kind of chaos that an open office plan might otherwise have.

You may know the Action Office 2 by its more generic name—

SAVAL: —which is the cubicle.

The cubicle promised a variety of advantages.

SAVAL: It’s meant to be very flexible, and it can form an impromptu conference room. And it was meant to divide up an open office plan in a way to mitigate the kind of chaos that an open office plan or an office landscape might otherwise have. And it was incredibly well-received. It was copied by a number of furniture companies. And soon it was spreading in offices everywhere.

But the cubicle could also be exploited.

SAVAL: It became a perfect tool for cramming more and more workers into less and less space very cheaply. The whole notion of what Propst was trying to do was to give a worker a space that they could control — was turned into the exact opposite. It was clear that his concept had become the most-loathed symbol of office life.

Indeed, the revolutionary, freedom-giving cubicle came to be seen as a sort of corporate version of solitary confinement. This left Robert Propst most unhappy.

SAVAL: And he blamed managers. He blamed people who were not enlightened, that created what he called barren, rat-hole-type environments.

Robert Propst, like the Schnelle brothers before him, had not quite succeeded in creating a vibrant and efficient open office. Their new environments introduced new problems: chaos in the first case, cubicles in the second. As with many problems that we humans try to correct — whether in office culture, or society at large — the correction turns out to be an overcorrection. Unintended consequences leap out, and humble us. And yet: in this case, the fact is that most offices today are still open offices. Why are we holding on to this concept if it makes so many people so unhappy?

TURBAN: If you’re looking purely at a cost per square foot, having an open office is cheaper.

BERNSTEIN: There are a lot of people, whether they’re managers or employees, who like the open office.

Bernstein admits that managers are primarily impressed by the cost savings of an open office. But some employees—

BERNSTEIN: Some employees like it because they have visions of it being more vibrant, more interactive. That fun, noisy, experiential place they’re hoping for once you take down the walls and make everyone able to see each other.

TURBAN: And there’s also been a big push around these collisions that have emerged in social sciences. How do you create these random interactions between people that spark creativity?

“Collision” is a term you hear a lot in office design and the design of public spaces generally. It’s the promise that unplanned encounters can lead to good things — between co-workers or neighbors, even strangers. Conversations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened; the exchange of ideas; unforeseen collaboration. Now, the office is plainly a different sort of space from the public square. The office is primarily concerned with productivity. We’d all like to be happy working in our offices, but is it maybe worth surrendering a bit of happiness — and privacy, and so on — for the sake of higher productivity? After all, that’s what we’re being paid for.

BERNSTEIN: If you want to have a certain kind of interaction that’s deep, productive in idea generation, or in something that requires us to have lots of “bandwidth” between each other, it’s nice to have that face-to-face interaction.

Ben WABER: Face-to-face conversations are so important.

That’s Ben Waber, he’s the C.E.O. of an organizational-analytics company called Humanyze.

WABER: What we do is use data about how people interact and collaborate at work. Think email, chat, meeting data, but now also sensor data about how people interact in the real world. And we use that to understand really what goes on inside companies.

Humanyze has developed sociometric I.D. badges, embedded with sensors, to capture these data.

WABER: We have by far the largest data set on workplace interaction in the world.

And what do the data say about face-to-face communication?

WABER: In all of our research, that has consistently been the most predictive factor of almost any organizational outcome you can think of: performance, job satisfaction, retention, you name it. People did evolve for millions of years to interact in a face-to-face way. We are very used to small changes in facial expression, small changes in tone of voice and that’s particularly important in work contexts where high levels of trust, especially as work gets more and more complex, and the things we build and make together are more and more complex. Really having that trust and being able to convey really rich information is critical.

Bernstein and Turban also believe in the value of face-to-face communication.

TURBAN: Nuanced communication around, “Here’s a proposal I have. Here is a thought I have about how this last meeting went.” That is a very rich and nuanced form of communication and most literature suggests that face-to-face communication is much better at that.

BERNSTEIN: Sociologists have suggested for a long time that propinquity breeds interaction — propinquity being co-location, being close to one another.

TURBAN: The closer two people are together, the more likely they are to interact, the more likely they are to get married, the more likely they are to work together.

BERNSTEIN: And interaction being, we will have a conversation, we will actually get some kind of collaboration done between the two of us.

TURBAN: You can look at slouching shoulders, you can see what is their facial expression, and that conveys a lot of information that is really hard to convey, no matter how good you are at emojis — and let me tell you, I am pretty good at emojis.

Okay, so face-to-face communication is important, at least for some purposes and on some dimensions. And an open office is designed to facilitate more face-to-face communication. So … does it work? That was the central question of Bernstein and Turban’s study.

DUBNER: In your study, there are two companies that were transitioning to open offices. First of all, can you reveal the identity of one or both of those companies?

BERNSTEIN: I can’t. In order to do this study, we had to agree to a level of confidentiality. I will say that we had a choice of sites to study and we chose the two that we thought would be most representative of the kind of work we were interested in, which is white-collar work in professional settings, Fortune 500 companies.

DUBNER: Can you give us some detail that helps us envision the kind of office and what the activities are?

BERNSTEIN: If you work in a global headquarters amongst a series of functions like H.R. or finance or legal or sales or marketing, this would describe your work setting.

DUBNER: And can you describe, for the two companies that you studied, they moved to open offices — what was their configuration beforehand?

BERNSTEIN: Everyone was in cubicles. And then they moved to an open space that basically mimicked that, but just without the cubicle walls.

TURBAN: Those barriers went down, so you could see if John was sitting next to Sally before, and there was a wall between them, that John could see Sally and Sally could see John, and that was the big difference between the original and the office afterwards.

DUBNER: So, tell us about the experiment. I want to know all kinds of things, like how many people were involved? Did they opt in or not? Was it randomized? How the data were gathered, and so on.

TURBAN: In the first study, we had 52 participants; in our second, we had 100 participants, and we wanted to measure communication before and after the move.

BERNSTEIN: We started with the most simple empirical puzzle we could start with, which was simply how much interaction takes place between the individuals before and after. We wanted to purely see if this hypothesis of a vibrant open office were true.

TURBAN: So before the move, we gave each of the participants sociometric badges.

These are the badges we mentioned earlier, from Humanyze.

BERNSTEIN: So they contain several sensors. One is a microphone. One is an I.R. sensor to show whether or not they’re facing another badge. They have an accelerometer to show movement and they have a Bluetooth sensor to show location.

TURBAN: So you can get a data point which looks like: “John spoke with Sally for 25 minutes at 2 p.m.” But you don’t know anything about what the content of the conversation is.

BERNSTEIN: A number of previous studies that have used the sociometric badges have shown that we are very aware of them for the first, say, few minutes that we have them on, and after that we sort of forget they’re there.

DUBNER: You write that the microphone is only registering that people talk and not recording or monitoring what they say. Do you think the employees who wore them believe that? I mean if I think there’s a one percent chance that my firm is monitoring or recording what I’m saying, I’m quite likely to say less, yes?

BERNSTEIN: Well, it’s actually kind of a funny question, because in this case we really weren’t. But look, we phrased the consent form as strongly as we could to ensure that they understood this was for research purposes, and if they hadn’t believed it, they probably would have opted out.

DUBNER: What are we to make of the fact that the data represents the people who opted in only? Because I’m just running through my head, if I were an employee and I’m told that there’s some kind of experiment going on with these smart people from Harvard Business School and, however much you tell me or don’t, I intuit some or I figure out some or I guess some. And we’re moving to an open office and I think, “Oh, man, I hate the open office, and therefore I definitely want to participate in this experiment so that I can sabotage it by behaving exactly the opposite of how I think they want me to behave.” Is that too skeptical or cynical?

BERNSTEIN: Boy, you sound like one of my reviewers in the peer review process.

DUBNER: Sorry.

BERNSTEIN: It is a valid concern. Let me tell you what we’ve tried to do to alleviate it. The first thing is we’ve compared the individuals who opted in to wearing the badge and those who did not to a series of demographics we got from the H.R. systems. And we don’t see systematic differences there.

TURBAN: It is always possible when you’re doing social science research that someone makes a guess, whether it’s accurate or not, about what this study is trying to understand, and then takes a personal stand and says, “I’m going to stand for what’s right, and what’s right is cubicles!” In that case, they would have to have done that for every day for two months. So it would have been a remarkable feat of endurance. We don’t think that that’s what happened, but the open office factions are real, so, definitely important to keep in mind.

In addition to all these data from the employees’ badges, the researchers could also measure each employee’s electronic communications — their emails and instant messages. Again, they were only measuring this communication, not examining the content.

BERNSTEIN: And so what we were able to do is compare individuals’ face-to-face and electronic communication before and after the move from cubicles to open spaces in these two environments.

Okay, so the Bernstein-Turban study looked at two Fortune 500 companies where employees had moved from cubicles to open offices. And they measured every input they could about how the employees’ communication changed — face-to-face and electronic communication. What do you think happened?

*     *     *

DUBNER: So, you’ve done the study, two firms over a period of time with a number of people to measure how their behavior changes, generally. Tell us what you found.

TURBAN: So, the study had two main conclusions.

BERNSTEIN: We found that when these individuals moved from closed cubicles into the open office, interaction decreased.

TURBAN: Face-to-face communication decreased by about 70 percent in both of our two studies. Conversely, that communication wasn’t entirely lost. Instead, the second result that we found was that communication actually increased virtually, so people emailed more, I.M.’ed more.

DUBNER: How much of that decrease was compensated by electronic?

TURBAN: We saw an increase of 20–50 percent of electronic communication. That means more emails, more I.M.’s. And depending on how you think about what an email is worth, maybe you could say that they made up for it. Is an email worth five minutes of conversation, is it two minutes?

BERNSTEIN: It’s a little bit hard to say, because an email and an interaction may not be comparable in item.

TURBAN: Even if we saw an increase in the amount of virtual communication, which totally made up for the face-to-face communication, what you probably saw was a loss in richness of communication — the net information that’s being conveyed was actually less.

DUBNER: What can you tell us about how the open space affected productivity and satisfaction?

BERNSTEIN: I’ll come out clean and say, we don’t have perfect data on performance, and we don’t have any data on satisfaction. We purposefully stayed away from satisfaction; we just wanted to look at the interaction of individuals. In one of our two studies, we have anecdotally some information where the organization felt that actually performance had declined as a result of this move.

I will say that, boy, if we think about this, there are probably lots of contexts that we can think of where more face-to-face interaction would be useful and lots of contexts in which we think more face-to-face interaction would not be useful. And that’s where I’d actually prefer to take the conversation about productivity. That, at the very least, to date managers of property, managers of organizations have not thought about this being a trade off. They’ve assumed cost and revenue go together. That may be true in some subset of environments, but in others that’s not going to be true.

DUBNER: What did the companies in your study do after you’d presented them with your findings?

BERNSTEIN: One of them has actually taken a step back from the open office. The other has attempted to make the open office work by adding more closed spaces to it.

Okay, so an empirical study of open offices finds that the primary benefit they are meant to confer — more face-to-face communication and the good things such communication can lead to — that it actually moves in the opposite direction! At least in the aggregate. To be fair, an open office is bound to be much better for certain tasks than others. And, more important, better for some people than for others. We’re not all the same. And some of us, I’m told — not me, but some of us — thrive in a potentially chattier office. But on balance, it would appear that being put out in the open leads most people to close themselves off a bit. Why? You can probably answer that question for yourself. But Turban and Bernstein have some thoughts too. Here’s one: maybe you don’t want to disturb other people:

TURBAN: So, when you’re in an open office, your voice carries. And I think people decide very reasonably to say, “Well I could speak with Tammy, who’s three desks away. But if I talk to Tammy, I’m going to disrupt Larry and Katherine, and so I will send her a quick message instead.”

Or maybe you compensate for the openness of the open office with behavior that sends a do-not-disturb signal.

BERNSTEIN: If everyone can see you, you want to signal to everyone that you are a hard worker, so you look intensely at your screen. Maybe you put on headphones to block the noise. Guess what? When we signal that, we also tend to signal, “And please don’t interrupt me from my work.” Which may very well have been part of what happened in our studies here.

And then there’s what Ethan Bernstein calls “the transparency paradox.”

BERNSTEIN: Very simply, the transparency paradox is the idea that increasingly transparent, open, observable workplaces can create less transparent employees.

For instance: let’s say you’ve been really productive all morning; now you want to take a break. You want to check your fantasy-football lineup; you want to look up some recipes for dinner. But you don’t want everyone in the office, especially your boss, to see what you’re doing. So: you do it anyway but you’re constantly looking over your shoulder in case you need to shut down the fantasy-football or recipe tabs.

BERNSTEIN: That has implications for productivity, because we spend time on it. We spend energy on it. We spend effort on it. We tend to believe these days that we get our best work done when we can be our authentic selves. Very few of us get up on a stage in front of a large audience, which is somewhat of how some people encounter the open office, and feel we can be our authentic selves.

Nicholas BLOOM: So, if I have an idea—

That’s the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom.

BLOOM: —if I go discuss with my colleague or my manager in an open office, I’m terrified that other people would hear. They may pass judgment or rumors can go around.

Bloom has studied this realm for years:

BLOOM: I work a lot on firms and productivity, so what makes some firms more productive, more successful. What makes other firms less successful.

DUBNER: So let me ask you this: a recent paper found that a couple of Fortune 500 companies who switched from cubicles to an open office plan with the hopes of increasing employee collaboration, that in fact the openness led to less collaboration. So, knowing what you know about offices and people, does that surprise you?

BLOOM: Not really. There’s a huge problem with open offices in terms of collaboration. You have no privacy. Whereas if it’s in a slightly more closed environment it’s easier to discuss ideas, to bounce things around.

Or consider the ultimate closed environment: your own home.

BLOOM: One piece of research I did that connected very much to the open office was the benefits of working from home. So working from home has a terrible reputation amongst many people. The nickname “shirking from home.” So I decided to do a scientific study. So we got a large online travel agency to ask a division who wanted to work from home. And we then had them randomize employees by even or odd birthdays into working at home versus working in the office.

DUBNER: Now, this was a travel agency in China, correct?

BLOOM: Yes, so it’s Ctrip, which is China’s largest travel agency. It’s very much like Expedia in the U.S. And stunningly what came out was, one of the biggest driving factors is, it’s just much quieter working from home. They complained so often about the amount of noise and disruption going on in the office. They’re all in an open office and they tell us about people having boyfriend problems, there’s a cake in the breakout room. The World Cup sweepstake. I mean, the most amazing was the woman that told us about her cubicle neighbor who’d have endless conversations with her mum about medical problems, including horrible things like ingrown toenails and some kind of wart issue. I mean what could be more distracting than that? Not surprisingly, in that case, the open office was devastating for her productivity.

DUBNER: So, you find that overall, working from home raises what exactly? Is it productivity? Is it happiness?

BLOOM: So we found working from home raises productivity by 13 percent. Which is massive. That’s almost an extra day a week. So a), much more productive, massively more productive, way more than anyone predicted. And b), they seemed a lot happier; their attrition rates, so how frequently they quit. Part of this was they didn’t have the commute and all the uncertainty. And they didn’t have to take sick days off. But the other big driver is it’s just so much quieter at home.

DUBNER: You also do write, though, that one of the downsides of working from home was promotion became less likely. Yes?

BLOOM: Yes. We don’t know why, but one argument is “out of sight, out of mind.” They just get forgotten about. And another story would be that actually they need to develop skills of human capital and relationship capital, therefore you need to be in the office to get that, to be promoted. And then the third reason I heard, we talked to people working at home and they’d say, “I don’t want to be promoted, because in order to be promoted, I need to come in the office more so.” I’m happy where I am. It’s not worth it.

DUBNER: “I just want them to leave me alone.”

BLOOM: I mean, the most surprising thing from the Ctrip working-from-home experiment was after the end of the nine months, Ctrip was so happy. They were saving about $2,000 per employee working from home because they are more productive and they saved in office space. So they said, “Okay, everyone can now work from home.” And we discovered of the people in the experiment, about 50 percent of them who had been at home decided to come back into the office. And that seemed like an amazing decision because they’re now choosing to commute for something like 40 minutes each way a day. And also since they are less productive in the office and about half their pay was bonus pay, they’re getting paid less. All in all we calculated, their time and pay was kind of falling by 10 to 15 percent. But they were still coming in. And the reason they told us is it was lonely at home.

So people always joke the three great enemies of working from home is the fridge, the bed, and the television. And some people can handle that and others can’t. And you don’t really know until you have tried it. So what happens is people try it and some people love it and are very productive. Great, they just stick with it, and others try and they loathe it and they come back into the office.

The more you learn about the productivity and happiness of office workers in different settings, the more obvious it is that one key ingredient is often overlooked: choice. Some employees really might be better off at home; others might prefer the cubicle; and some might thrive in an open office. You also have to acknowledge that no one environment will be ideal for every task.

Janet POGUE McLAURIN: So if you stop and think about: how do we spend our time? About half of our time is spent in focus mode, which means that we’re working alone; a little over a quarter of our time is working with others in person; and about 20 percent is working with others virtually.

That’s Janet Pogue McLaurin, from the global design-and-architecture firm Gensler.

POGUE McLAURIN: I’m one of our global workplace practice area leaders.

Given the diversity of tasks required of the modern office worker—

POGUE McLAURIN: —you need the best environment for the task at hand. So, if you’re getting ready to go onto a conference call, instead of taking it at your desk, you may go into a conference room. When you finish that, you may go back to your desk to catch up on email. You may socialize around the café area or even take a walking meeting outside. We need to have all these other work settings at our disposal to be able to create a wonderful work experience.

That doesn’t sound so hard, does it? So how do you create that? Let’s start with the basics. Pogue McLaurin acknowledges that many open offices don’t address their key shortcoming.

POGUE McLAURIN: The biggest complaint that we see in open offices that don’t work is the noise. And how do you mitigate noise interruptions and distractions? And that can be noise as well as visual. Being able to design a space that zones the floor in smaller neighborhoods, that tries to get buffers between noisy activities. There’s architectural interventions we can also do, with ceilings and materials and white noise, that may be added to the space. And it’s not about creating too quiet an environment — that can be just as ineffective as a noisy environment. You really want to have enough buzz and energy, but just not hear every word.

You also want to account for what economists call heterogeneous preferences, and what normal people call individual choice.

POGUE McLAURIN: Choice is one of the key drivers of effective workspace, and we have found that the most innovative firms actually offer twice as much choice and exercise on that choice than non-innovative firms do. And choice is really around autonomy, about when and where to work. It could be as simple as having a choice of being able to do focus work in the morning or being able to work at home a day, or in another work setting in the office.

To that end, no two employees are exactly alike — and, more important, no two companies are alike either.

POGUE McLAURIN: I think some common mistakes that organizations do is they try to copy someone else’s design. So if you think it’s a cool idea of something that you saw on the west coast, let’s say it’s a tech firm, and you’re not even a tech firm, and you’re sitting here on the east coast and you try to just copy it verbatim, it doesn’t work. It’s got to reflect how your organization works and the purpose and brand and community that you’re a part of.

So oftentimes, companies would start to adopt what other organizations are doing and say, “Yes, that will save us space, so let’s adopt it,” but they’re missing out by not providing all these other spaces to balance. So they want the efficiency without creating all the other work settings that people need in order to be truly productive.

It’s worth noting that Janet Pogue McLaurin, a principal with a design-and-architecture firm, is arguing that the key to a successful office is: design and architecture. But it’s also worth noting that her firm has done a great deal of research in all different kinds of offices, all different kinds of companies, all over the world.

POGUE McLAURIN: We’ve done several studies in the U.S. and the U.K. But we’ve also done Latin America, Asia, Middle East and we’re just completing a study in Germany.

So: what’s her prognosis for the long-maligned open office?

POGUE McLAURIN: The open office is not dead. Oftentimes people say,“Which is better: private office or open plan?” We measured all types of individual work environments, and what we’ve found is that if you solve for design, noise, and access to people and resources, they perform equally, and one is essentially not better than the other. And the best open plan can be as effective as a private one. And that was a surprise. I love data when it tells you something unexpected.

So do we, Janet Pogue McLaurin. So do we.

*     *     *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Matt Hickey, Corinne Wallace, and Daphne Chen. We had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Ethan Bernstein, Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.

Nicholas Bloom, economist at Stanford University.

Janet Pogue McLaurin, principal at Gensler.

Nikil Saval, author and journalist.

Stephen Turban, development & innovation at the Office of the President, Fulbright University Vietnam.

Ben Waber, president and C.E.O. of Humanyze.

RESOURCES

“Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,” Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, Zhichun Jenny Ying (2013).

“The Impact of the Open Workspace on Human Collaboration,” Ethan Bernstein, Stephen Turban (2018).

The Office: A Facility Based on Change by Robert Propst (Herman Miller 1968).

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval (Anchor 2014).

EXTRA

“Are We in a Mattress-Store Bubble?” Freakonomics Radio (2016).

“Time to Take Back the Toilet,” Freakonomics Radio (2014).

The post Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be (Ep. 358 Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/office-rebroadcast/

[gaycey-sketchit]

(Gary anon) Yeah, I feel like they got a good couple of years, there's characters still yet to be in it. (We still got some months until that day, let's enjoy the ride while we can) The episode sounded pretty crammed even before it aired; but I had hope the characters would be okay. (At least he had better treatment than Alder has right now, the only Champion not referenced in any way yet. Alongside Max, the only companion left to mention) Heh, I also saw draw comparisons of this month's

.

(Part 2) Animedia poster looking very similar to the one with Gary, Ash and Goh in suits, with either people saying "The gays and the lesbians" or to round out 'Ash x Serena' and 'Goh x Chloe', *Lisia and Gary are being shoved together as a couple. (At least it's better than randomly having Leaf/Green paired with him) Having seen the subs, it's clear that Ash still left a major impact on Serena and strives to do to others like Ash has. Her having Delphox now is a nice touch too. (I seen some)

(Part 3) (posts kinda miffed about the blue ribbon he gave her being missing. But I've seen others discuss the [supposed romantic] symbolism of the lights at the end) Yeah, I can see Serena coming back again. But more in a "Kalos gang reunion" or "all companions coming back at the end" kinda way and not "Ash and Serena will have a private episode or *leave the series as a couple". (*It's ultimately harmless, but with how some fans act, it just makes me hope that if Ash's story ends,)

(Part 4) (he leaves by himself to keep the ship tides open. Yes, no matter how cool a reference Ash and Gary traveling together would be) At the very least, I can understand having fixated feelings of characters that still linger from childhood, be it romantic or not. (We were the same ages as certain characters at one point) I can even understand being curious on what they'd be like older. (This fandom has been waiting for a hypothetical adult Ash for how long) But how people act

(Part 5) towards female characters has been a long-standing problem in fandoms. (It's so bad with Serena cause of how Ash is with romance; I hate how I saw this coming WAY before the kiss) I know some want Giovanni and Ash to have a proper big fight; especially after the fake-out in OS and lackluster one in BW, but it feels more fitting that TRio delivers the final blow on that front and being the ones to end or 're-brand' Team Rocket.

Yeah, it'll probably last quite a while longer. I want to see if any Hisuian characters make it in and how that's handled.

Yeah.

I'm kind of amazed at how much they managed to fit in that episode.

At least there’s that. I did enjoy him in this episode.

Yep, that’s this fandom alright. I’m on the gays and lesbians side of things but to be fair. I have to give the other crowd credit for Gary/Lisia being an actually interesting “pair the spares” ship. If I didn’t feel so strongly about Gary being gay that it genuinely makes me uncomfortable seeing him paired with girls, I might actually be able to get behind that one.

Aww, that’s nice. She’s nice.

Well, it’s good that AmourShippers found something to be happy about. 

Oh, definitely.

Yeah, I really think that’d be for the best. Leave it all open to interpretation. I don’t expect any Ash ship to become canon, considering both the nature of the series and the nature of well, Ash, and I think we’re all better off that way.

I can partially get that, but regardless of my past feelings, when I’m twice a character’s age it’d feel weird to hold onto that. (I did admittedly luck out regarding Blue though, since he got to actually age throughout the games he appeared in.) And yeah, conceptualizing what these kids we grew up with would be like as adults is interesting. 

Fundamentally, the problem lies mostly with misogyny, yeah. And that’s a problem everywhere.

Yeah, the Ash and Serena situation has always been... a Situation. I don’t even fault Serena as a character too hard, because having an all-consuming crush is something that happens to a lot of people who are young and experiencing romantic feelings for the first time--it’s real, it’s cute--and from what I hear she found her own path in life regardless. It’s just kind of unfortunate for her that said crush had to be on the most oblivious boy in the world, and the fandom is... not always great about the whole thing. I feel like it’s partly the fandom’s tendency to forget that these characters are just kids (and ten is so, so young) and take things... a little too seriously. Puppy love is so pure and innocent and adorable, and sometimes it’s nice to just appreciate it for what it is.

Oh man, the TRio themselves putting an end to Team Rocket would be great. Would love that for them.

[81scorp]

Constructive criticism: The last airbender (2010)

Ah yes, Avatar the last airbender.

Back in the mid 2000`s I saw a trailer for this series and thought that it looked interesting.

Then I got the chance to see a few episodes and thought: "This is pretty good."

Then after I saw the first season I thought: "This isn`t good. It`s great!"

Then I heard that there was gonna be a live action movie. This COULD be good... And it was gonna be directed by M. Night Shyamalan, who at that time had made a few bad movies.

But it could still work, I thought. In the beginning of his career he had made a few GOOD movies and this could be the one where he gets good again. It could still work.

I was wrong.

Let`s do an autopsy, see what went wrong and how it could have been better.

Book one: The racebending

The Avatar world is different from our world, yes. But it is clearly based on cultures from our world. Katara and Sokka`s culture is clearly based on innuit culture. Couldn`t hey have casted innuit actors or at least asian actors? In a time where there are so few roles for asian actors to play, why cast white actors to play characters who`s names and cultures clearly scream "I`m asian! I`m asian!"?

Book two: General problems

The movie`s problem is not just in the casting. Let`s say that Aang, Katara and Sokka were played by asian actors but everything else in the movie was left unchanged. A bad movie is still a bad movie, no matter what the ethnicity of the actors are.

So, what are the general problems?

Too much stuff: Too much stuff crammed into a running time that is not long enough to give the plot room to breathe or take the time it needs. The result? The pacing is too fast and the movie is forced to use voice overs to tell us things that the movie didn`t have the time to show us. Not the best thing to do in a visual medium where you should show and not tell. I would remove some plot elements that are not needed and increase the running time.

Fight scenes shot in one take: This is not inherently a bad thing as long as you know what you are doing. Which is not the case in this case. The wide shots show how poorly planned the choreography is as the actors are just standing there waiting for their turn. I`m not an expert on fight choreography or shooting cool fight scenes so my suggestion in this case would be to ask someone who is an expert in that area when making this movie.

The acting: Better actors, better directing or both.

And yes there`s the thing about how the movie deviates from the show. A movie doesn`t have to be super faithful to the source material as long as the changes make it better or at least doesn`t make it worse. That being said, changing the firebenders to be reliant on external fire makes them less threatening as villains. There are many more things that I can complain about on this topic but I don`t have all day and neither do you.

So I`m just gonna skip to the part where I tell you about how this movie could have been if I could travel back in time and fix the script.

Book three: The plot

Sokka and Katara is out hunting for food. They argue a little and then they find a giant iceberg that seems to contain some giant animal. (Maybe its edible?) Katara breaks the ice and a bright column of light shoots high into the sky when it cracks. Out comes a young boy named Aang and a six-legged, giant bison.

Zuko sees the column of light and orders his crew to head toward the light, (despite protests from his uncle Iroh) insisting that the light was emitted by the Avatar.

Katara takes (despite protests from Sokka) Aang with her home to their village. She shows Aang around the place and tells him a little about the village`s history. She shows him an old, abandoned Fire Nation ship. Aang goes into it to investigate and triggers a booby trap that fires a flare rocket. Now zuko knows where they are.

Zuko`s ship arrives at their village. Sokka tries to fight Zuko but is easily defeated. Zuko orders the villagers to surrender the Avatar to him. Aang steps forward and tries to be diplomatic, asking Zuko to leave. Zuko refuses and launches a series of fire blasts at Aang. Aang is able to defend himself with airbending, but after a few seconds, realizing that Zuko's attacks would inevitably strike the people he has befriended, he agrees to come if Zuko spares the villagers life.

Sokka and Katara follows the ship on Appa. Aang breaks free, fights the guards and Zuko, falls from the ship, almost drowns, goes into an Avatar state and uses waterbending to survive. Sokka and Katara arrives just in time to catch him and bring him to safety.

Somewhere else: It`s night, the moon shines, a samall baby is lowered into a pool of water. It doesn`t show any signs of life. Her dark hair turns white, she opens her eyes and screams. Her parents sigh a sigh of relief: their child is alive.

A young woman with white hair wakes up, she looks at the moon from her window (what we just saw was her dream). Elsewhere: Aang looks at the moon. He and his friends have found a place to camp for the night. Aang remembers his old mentor Monk Gyatso who taught him the virtues and responsibility of being an air nomad, but also the importance of having fun. Aang smiles, closes his eyes and sleeps.

Aang and his friends arrives at the southern air temple. Aang, who believes that the temple is only temporarily evacuated and that the monks will return any minute, gives Sokka and Katara a guided tour of his home. Katara who knows better worries about how Aang will react when he finds out the truth.

They come to a room that Aangs never been inside before. Inside the room are statues of people who have been Avatars before Aang. The latest statue is one of the firebender Roku. Aang touches the Roku statue and acts as if a ghost just passed through him. They continue the guided tour, Aang meets a lemur that he names Momo, then he finally discovers that monk Gyatso (and other monks that he knew) have been dead for several years. His sorrow turns into anger and he goes into the Avatar state, Katara consoles and calms him down.

Where should they go now? Sokka thinks that they should try the Northern water tribe. It`s worth a shot. they continue their journey.

Zuko and Iroh dock at an island controlled by the fire nation to repair their ship. Admiral Zhao, who is in charge at the island starts to put two and two together and relizes that Zuko has found the Avatar. After some more questioning he finds out that the Avatar is just a child, and that Zuko fought said child and lost. He provokes Zuko and calls him pathetic, Zuko challenges him to an agni kai.

Zhao and Zuko fight. At first Zhao gets the upper hand, then Zuko gets the upper hand. Zhao falls to the ground and Zuko has a chance to burn him but chooses not to do so. Even in exile, he has proved himself to be more honorable than Zhao.

When they leave the island Zuko realizes that a contest has just started between him and Zhao over who will be the first to capture the Avatar.

Aang and his friends set up camp for the night. They talk a little, Aang reveals that he eavesdropped on a conversation between the monks where he found out the heavy burden and the responsibility that comes with being the Avatar. He ran away, flew into a storm and froze himself and Appa in a giant block of ice. Katara and Sokka understands.

Night. Aang sleeps. Roku comes to him in a dream, tells him about Sozin`s comet and about the Avatar state. If he gets killed in the Avatar state the cycle will be broken and the Avatar will not be reincarnated. Aang understands.

Next day: they walk through the woods, get ambushed, captured and taken to a village by the Kyoshi warriors. Aangs explains that he is friendly and that he was once Lady Kyoshi. After this expanation he and his friends are treated as guests. Suki teaches Sokka to fight better. (Since this would be a 2 hr movie and not a 20 episodes long series I think I`ll skip the part where Sokka is dressed in a Kyoshi outfit.) One of the villagers sees that Katara is of the water tribe and gives her an old water bending scroll. Katara is overjoyed, this is just what she needed! Zuko and his soldiers attack the village, set fire to a few houses and a cabbage salesman gets his cart destroyed.

Cabbage salesman: MY CABBAGEES!!

Aang and his friends put out the fires caused by the fire nation soldiers and get Zuko to chase them so he can draw them away from the village. Then they shake him off through some daring risky manouvers that make Sokka lose his lunch. They get some time to rest that Katara uses to study the scroll and practice and improve her water bending. Doing so helps her to teach Aang the basics of water bending. She also discovers that she can use water bending to heal injuries.

Elsewhere: Onboard Zuko`s ship. Iroh tells the crew that the burnscar on Zuko`s face was the result of a duel with his own father, who had taken offense when Zuk spoke up in a meeting to oppose a plan to sacrifice fire nation soldiers. Zuko may not know where Aang is now but he knows where he is heading. Unfortunately, so does Zhao who is following Zuko`s ship. Shao reveals to one of his soldiers that several years ago he found a scroll in an ancient library that revealed that wate benders get their power from the moon. So in order to take out an army of water benders on their home turf he`s just gonna have to take out the moon. "How do you take out the moon?" wonders the soldier. Zhao (looking at a scroll with a yin and yang symbol of it): "Oh there`s a way."

Elsewhere: Aang and the gang arrive at the Northern water tribe. They are greeted as guests. Princess Yue (The woman with white hair that we saw earlier.) acts as their guide, shows them around and tells them what they need to know. Sokka asks about her hair.

She tells them that when she was born she was very weak, barely alive. The moon gave some of it`s power to her to save her life.

A little later Katara and Aang wants to train with Pakku, the water bending master of the northern water tribe. He refuses to train Katara because sexism. Princess Yue shows up and orders him to let Katara train, he reluctantly agrees.

Yue and Sokka get some time together. He tells her a joke that makes her laugh and she tells him a joke that makes him laugh.

Katara and Aang train and improve their water bending skills.

Fire nation ships show up, the northpole gets ready for war.

Fire nation troops invade, there`s a big battle. Aang can`t join the fight, he could die and is too important. He wants to do something. As the nearly full moon hangs in the night sky, Yue tells Aang and Katara that the moon taught waterbending to the people of the Water Tribes as they observed its push and pull on the ocean. Aang realizes that if he could find a place to meditate he could ask the moon and ocean spirits. Yue knows a place.

She takes the gang to a garden surrounded on all sides by towering walls of ice. Aang, sensing the tranquility of the oasis, begins to meditate at the base of the oasis pool, which contains a black and a white koi fish encircling each other. Aang leaves his body.

Zuko shows up and kidnaps Aang`s body. Katara fights him but is defeated. After Zuko leaves with Aang`s body Katara gets up and together with Sokka and Yue she chases after Zuko.

In the spirit world Aang meets Avatar Roku who guides himthrough the spirit world to find a spirit who knows about the moon and ocean spirits.

Zuko is wading through the snow with Aang`s body. He sees a cave where he can take shelter (and bind Aang in case he wakes up). In the spirit world Aang finds the cave where the spirit who can help him lives: Koh the face stealer. Roku reminds Aang to not show any emotions or Koh will steal his face.  Sokka, Katara, and Yue continue to look for Aang in the blizzard with the help of Appa.

Ang meets Koh who, while he talks, tries to manipulate Aang into showing emotions. Aang keeps a calm and stoic face.

He asks Koh to help him find the moon and ocean spirit, Koh tells Aang the spirits' names – Tui (push) and La (pull) and tells Aang that he has already met them. Aang realizes the spirits' mortal identities upon hearing Koh's  analogous reference to yin and yang and his face lights up; Koh, hearing  the uplift in Aang's tone, whirls around to face him, only to find that  Aang has caught himself, narrowly avoiding losing his face. Aang politely and calmly leaves Koh`s cave and then hurries back to the gateway where he entered the spirit world.

At the Water Tribe, night has fallen, and the full moon has risen,  enhancing the power of the waterbending warriors as they do battle with  the soldiers of the Fire Nation.

Aang's spirit returns to the oasis in the Northern Water Tribe, finds that his body is not there, is then pulled to his body through the sky, rushing to his body in the form of a  streak of light. Katara, on Appa's back as she searches for Aang, sees  and realizes it is Aang's spirit. They turn Appa to follow the light as  it reaches the cave where Zuko is hiding with Aang's body. His  spirit rejoins his body, and after a short, curt exchange with Zuko,  Aang escapes from the cave with some airbending. Zuko manages to catch the still-bound Aang, but Appa lands next to them and Katara jumps down and knocks Zuko out with some snowbending. As Aang`s gang and Yue prepare to leave, Aang hesitates;  not wanting to leave Zuko to freeze to death, he takes his body into the saddle before they depart.

Reaching the oasis, Zhao removes the white koi from its pond; as he  hoists it over his head in triumph, the full moon above transforms,  turning from white to blood-red. Immediately, the waterbending warriors  lose their bending abilities, and the Fire Nation troops begin to push  forward. Yue, on Appa's back, begins to feel faint. Aang feels it as  well.

Zhao arrogantly applauds his own efforts to fulfill his "destiny". He is interrupted by Aang, who has arrived with the others and stands opposite Zhao. Aang  pleads with Zhao to consider his actions, Iroh appears,  agrees with Aang and promises Zhao, "Whatever you do to that  spirit, I'll unleash on you ten-fold." He then orders Zhao to release  the fish, preparing to fight.  

Zhao is about to put the fish back, but then kills it with fire, and destroys the moon.

The world goes dark. Iroh unleashes his firebending on Zhao and his guards, easily defeating the soldiers but inadvertently allows Zhao himself to escape.

Yue mourns the loss of the moon spirit. Aang goes into the avatar state, steps into the pool and together with the ocean spirit he takes the form of a massive glowing koi fish. It unleashes its wrath upon the invaders, wiping them out and clearing the city of enemy soldiers. With the city clear, the koi makes its way toward the sea.  

Meanwhile, Zhao slips through the deserted streets, trying to escape; he  is suddenly attacked by a newly freed and infuriated Zuko. Zuko realizes that the darkening of the moon must be Zhaos work. They fight.

In the oasis, where the group has given up hope of saving Tui, Iroh notices, with astonishment, that Yue has been touched by the Moon  Spirit, and that as a result, some of its life force is within her; Yue  affirms this, then decides that she should try to restore Tui  to life by giving hers to it. Sokka, upset by this idea, protests. Yue knows that she has to do this, kisses Sokka, steps into he pool, gives her lifeforce to the fish and dies.

The fish is alive, the moon comes back, the giant koi sees this, ends its violent rampage, places Aang atop the outer wall as it moves back through the Water Tribe city. On its way back it sees Zhao, still dueling with Zuko. It grabs him and picks him up. Zuko, forgetting the duel, tries to help Zhao, reaching out a hand to him, but Zhao stubbornly refuses to take it, and he is pulled beneath the water and disappears.

The next day Aang, Sokka and Katara prepares for their next journey. Pakku, impressed by Katara`s efforts gives her a bottle of water from the spirit oasis, said to have special healing properties. You never know, it could be useful.

Far away from the city on a simple catamaran (their ship got destroyed in the battle with the Northern watertribe), Zuko rests, gathering his strength and preparing himself for the next round of his hunt for the Avatar.

Aang, Sokka and Katara fly away on Appa to the next adventure.

In the Fire Nation, Fire Lord Ozai imparts the knowledge of Iroh's treasonous behavior and Zuko's failure to his daughter, Azula, and entrusts her with a special task as she looks up at him, a smile on her face.

--------------------------------------------

Deviation nr: 136 Written stuff nr: 34

As I wrote this CC I realized that it is hard to make a good movie based on ATLA. You have to know what to cut and what to keep.Also, to be honest I got really lazy. Some of the text in this editorial is just copy pasted from the avatar fandom wiki.

And as usual: English is not my first language, so apologies for any mistakes I`ve made in spelling, grammar or sentence structures. Avatar the last airbender is created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko

[recentanimenews]

The Definitive Ranking of Bleach OPs

  For many years Bleach ruled the roost in the United States fandom as the coolest comic running in Shonen Jump magazine. For a period of time the anime was similarly successful, inspiring everything from cosplay to fanfiction to a live-action movie. Even more than Naruto, a far more sprawling franchise, Bleach defines a specific period of early 2000s anime fight media that briefly enraptured countless high school students as they illegally pored over multiple-part episode splits on YouTube, crafting AMVs set to Linkin Park while listening to Number One on repeat. And yes, I'm including myself in that crowd.

  The Bleach manga ended years ago, and the anime did too. That's all to the good for our purposes though, because it lets us build a genuine historical record based on the anime's most significant achievement: its range of incredible opening songs and animation. What is the best Bleach opening of them all? To craft this list I used this thorough and objective criteria:

  1. Is the song a banger?

  2. Is this opening at least as cool as Sonic Adventure 2's "Escape from the City?"

  3. How does it stand up as an artifact of its time, and how does it stand up today?

  Let's begin!

  15. "BLUE" (ViViD) 

    I like the attention to scale and space in this opening, with energy blasts blowing through whole rows of buildings and Ichigo knocking enemies over like bowling balls. But there's so much fighting happening here, crammed into such a short space, that it's hard to follow. Not a fan of the song either, so this one's placing at the bottom.

  14. "Anima Rossa" (Porno Graffitti)

Porno Graffitti has a long history composing opening themes for anime, accompanying everything from 2003's Fullmetal Alchemist to My Hero Academia. The song they've contributed here is a bluesy number that I'd rank above several other entries on this list. Then why is this #14? When watching this opening, I couldn't shake the feeling that this sequence could have been servicable for any other shonen anime series. Bleach earned its fame through a certain je ne sais quoi, and if it's not here, no matter how competent the sequence is otherwise, what's the point?

  13. "Chu-Bura" (Kelun)

  When rewatching openings to put this feature together, I was frankly blown away by the first half or so of this opening sequence. The cast being cute together and hanging out at the beach! Some unexpectedly fluid animated hijinks as Ichigo walks to school! A pretty good song! Then the fighting kicks in and the rest of the opening is comparatively boring. Worth a watch, though.

  12. "Harukaze" (SCANDAL)

  This was the last Bleach opening to be featured in the anime series, and features some fun callbacks to earlier episodes like a runthrough of every episode title card (!!). I wouldn't say this is one of the show's best, but it gets stronger as it goes along and features some neat and stylish visual tableaux. The doors opening at the end to reveal the sponsors is a nice touch, too.

  11. "Alones" (Aqua Timez)

  Watching Bleach openings on YouTube as a child, I used to be freaked out by the sight of Kon the stuffed animal very loudly singing the theme song. On rewatch, though, I think I underrated this one: it's a splintered sequence of memory, love and grief that bears the strong iconography Bleach had in its prime. Aqua Timez would later do better, though!

  10. "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" (Beat Crusaders)

  What makes a Bleach opening? Is it the music? Outrageous poses? Fast-paced fights? This opening doubles down on "style," which is admittedly Bleach's ace in the hole. There are sequences here that refer back to the first opening sequence, but on a grander scale: like the red and black silhouettes of Ichigo and Rukia being mean to each other, but projected on several television screens! Or every character recieving their own cool spinning CD cover. The song isn't really to my taste, but overall it's a good time.

  9. "chAngE" (Miwa)

  This opening makes an immediate statement when we see Ichigo's hometown erupt into an unmistakable mushroom cloud freeze frame. My other favorite bit is when the spooky devil hand reaches towards the other hand, just as the vocals spike. What can I say, I'm a mark for scenes in anime when hands reach out to each other but don't quite connect! I'm an Ikuhara fan, sue me.

  8. "Velonica" (Aqua Timez)

  This is the first great example on this list of a classic trope in Bleach openings: The Pose. It's no secret that Tite Kubo draws not so much to tell stories (though he can do that on occasion) but to showcase characters wearing cool outfits while they do cool things. This opening wrings everything it can out of the cast of the show standing in exaggerated poses while the camera swings from one angle to another. And it works! The bit of the Vizards being swallowed up by darkness, followed by Urahara's hat tip, has been lodged in my brain since seeing this.

  7. "Ichirin no Hana" (High and Mighty Color)

  More poses! The main cast looking very tired and noble as they stand on the battlefield. Shunsui's sword kata. Screaming vocals. When I asked the barista at the coffee shop today for his favorite Bleach opening, this was his answer; the harsh sound of the Soul Society arc's grand finale. It's a great pick, but the effects are a bit dated for me in 2020. Byakuya's special attack in particular screams early 2000s CG.

  6. "Shojo S" (SCANDAL)

  More outrageous poses from your favorite characters, except that you also have Rukia, Orihime and Rangiku doing a choreographed dance! I wasn't sure what to make of this sequence when I first saw it, but it's risen higher and higher in my estimation with each successive watch. Now I'm at the point where I'd say this is the Bleach opening I initially underrated the most (though there's some real classics coming down the pike!)

  5. "After Dark" (Asian Kung-Fu Generation)

  Bleach openings can be maximalist, so I find it fascinating how restrained this one is. Ichigo's friends running in the desert, the repetition of symbols juxtaposed to flaming credits, and a black-and-white super-cool layout of Aizen's war chamber. That's it. But set to the riffs of all-time great Japanese popular rock band Asian Kung-Fu Generation, that's all you really need.

  4. "D-technoLife" (UVERworld)

  This is the Bleach opening that defines the whole series for many folks. The theme song to the start of the Soul Society arc, it harnesses the band UVERworld (still putting out songs for shonen anime even today!) to a carnival of non-stop forward momentum that keeps topping itself with cool characters and fight sequences. Within its specific niche of early 2000s anime openings about shonen heroes determinedly running toward the camera, this one's never been topped. But it's not my personal favorite, so I'm putting it at number 4! The scene where Yourichi takes a bite out of Soi Fon's sword and holds it between their teeth is outrageously good, though.

  3. "*~Asterisk~" (Orange Range) 

    It's fascinating in retrospect how little Bleach's first opening actually has to do with what happens in Bleach. We don't see much in the way of hollows or shinigami, and the only swordfighting we're given is a brief few seconds of Ichigo fighting some interchangable bad guys in kimono. Instead we're given a vibe: Ichigo's friends wearing stylish clothes straight from the manga while the camera darts from one angle to another, Orihime and her friends spray-painting the title of the theme song on the screen, the camera revolving endlessly around Ichigo as he stands in the middle of the city. The promise of this sequence was eventually crushed beneath a never-ending tide of new characters and concepts as the series collapsed under its own weight... but for me and my friends, watching this opening relentlessly on YouTube as teenagers, it convinced us of Bleach's effortless cool. The best first Bleach opening.

2. "Ranbu no Melody" (SID ❤) 

  Like the previous opening, "Ranbu no Melody" is notable as much for what it doesn't show as for what it does. We see Ichigo, the hero of the story, for only a few seconds. Instead of our heroes running endlessly toward the camera, we are given the slow unravelling of reality by invisible forces that repeatedly squish and stretch the aspect ratio and blast the viewer with impossibly fast, overlaid images. The brainchild of Masashi Ishihama, one of the best directors of opening sequences working today, this one works as both a horrifying short film of dramatic climax and as a sneakily crafted foreshadowing-laden promise to longtime fans of Bleach that the story has been building to this arc from the very beginning. The best opening.

  1. "Rolling Star" (YUI) 

  As a child, I would watch the first six openings of Bleach over and over on YouTube. I loved the first, and the second, and the third. But the one I would return to over and over again, even though it came from a section of the series that I never reached myself, was "Rolling Star." Seen in retrospect, it's a synthesis of all the aspects that made Bleach openings memorable. It's stylish, rendering Ichigo's hometown as a neon-lit sunset hangout where battles secretly play out just around the corner. It's just a bit scary, with Ichigo duelling his masked evil self as traumatic future events are carefully foreshadowed. But more than anything, this opening sells a closeness between the main cast as they eat together and fight together. A careful juxtaposition between the high school gang of friends who were way cooler than you'd ever be, and the supernatural terrror just barely poking out from beneath the surface.

  This opening was also directed by Masashi Ishihama, though the previous listed entry represents a more concentrated form of his style. "Ranbu no Melody"'s sequence may very well be superior from an animation perspective, but from my point of view, "Rolling Star" is and will always will be the best Bleach opening. And the song's a banger, so there's that!

  What is your personal Bleach opening ranking? Did I underrate "D-technoLife"? Is Bleach more or less cool than Sonic Adventure 2's "Escape from the City?" Let us know in the comments!

---

Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. He sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? He recommends reading David Brothers's old pieces on Bleach if you want to learn more. You can follow Adam on Twitter at: @wendeego

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[jeroldlockettus]

Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be (Ep. 358)

Feeling stressed from working in a noisy open office? Tell your boss that working from home increases worker productivity by 13 percent! (Photo: MaxPixel)

It began as a post-war dream for a more collaborative and egalitarian workplace. It has evolved into a nightmare of noise and discomfort. Can the open office be saved, or should we all just be working from home?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Hey, are you at work right now? And do you work in an office? Have you ever worked in an office? If you have, there’s a good chance it was an open office, at least to some degree. The open office design has been around for decades, in a variety of forms. If you’re a cynic, you might think an open office is all about cramming the maximum number of employees into the minimum amount of real estate. But you could also imagine that an open office produces better interaction and more collaboration. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if this were true? That’s what these people wanted to learn.

Ethan BERNSTEIN: I’m Ethan Bernstein, I’m an associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.

Stephen TURBAN: My name is Stephen Turban. I am a recent graduate of Harvard College and I currently work for a global management consultancy.

Stephen DUBNER: Okay so, we’re here to talk about a paper that you co-authored, called “The Impact of the Open Workspace on Human Collaboration.”

TURBAN: I don’t think I realized how much anger there was against open offices until the research was published and I was contacted by a number of friends and colleagues about their open offices and their deep, deep emotional scarring.

BERNSTEIN: There’s certainly a population of people out there who hate — I think that’s perhaps even not strong enough—

DUBNER: Not strong enough, agreed. But proceed please.

BERNSTEIN: People find it impossible to get work done. They find it demoralizing.

TURBAN: Also the lack of privacy, and the feeling that they’re being watched by others.

BERNSTEIN: Privacy tends to give us license to be more experimental, to potentially find opportunities for continuous improvement, to avoid distractions that might take us away from the focus we have on our work.

TURBAN: Ethan is really, I would say, the king of privacy.

BERNSTEIN: My research over time has been about the increasingly transparent workplace and its impact on human behavior and therefore performance.

BERNSTEIN: Over time, I’ve gotten asked the question, “What about the open office? How does it impact the way in which people work and collaborate?” I haven’t had an empirical answer.

In search of an empirical answer, Bernstein and Turban began a study of two Fortune 500 companies that were converting from cubicles to open offices. Sure, the downsides of an open office are obvious: the lack of privacy; having to overhear everything your coworkers say. But what if the downsides are offset by a grand flowering of collaboration and communication and idea-generation? What if the open office is in fact a brilliant concept that we’ve all been falsely maligning?

*      *      *

The office is such a quintessential emblem of modern society that it may seem it’s been around forever. But of course it hasn’t.

SAVAL: The economy of the United States was based on farming and it was based on manufacturing. The office was almost an afterthought.

That’s Nikil Saval, the author of a book called Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.

SAVAL: People thought, “Well, offices are essentially paperwork factories. So we should just sort of array them in an assembly-line sort of formation.”

This meant a big room filled with long rows of desks and, scattered on the periphery, private offices for the managers. This factory model, which got its start in the late 19th century, came to be known as the American plan. And it was standard office form for decades, at least in the U.S. But then, in the middle of the twentieth century, in Germany …

SAVAL: … There were two brothers, the Schnelle brothers, who began to wonder about the nature of the American plan. There was a sense that this was arbitrary, and there was no real reason to lay out an office in this way.

In 1958, Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle created the Quickborner consulting group with the idea of bringing some intentionality to modern office design.

SAVAL: And one of the ideas that came to them was that an office is not like a factory, it’s actually a different kind of workplace. And it requires its own sort of system. Maybe there isn’t a reason to have desks in rows. Maybe there isn’t a reason for people to have private offices at all, if essentially the office is not about producing things but it’s about producing ideas and about producing communication among different people. And so over time they pioneered a concept that they called the burolandschaft, or “office landscape.” And it was essentially the first truly open plan office.

The idea was to create an office that was more collaborative and more egalitarian.

SAVAL: It looks extremely chaotic. You’d just have desks in clusters and they just seem to be arranged in a pretty haphazard form. But, in fact, there was rigorous planning around it, in a way that would facilitate communication and the flow of people and ideas. And it eventually made its way to England and the United States, and it was considered an incredible breakthrough.

A breakthrough perhaps — but the earliest open offices drew complaints similar to the ones we hear today. Lots of complaints.

SAVAL: By not instituting a barrier between people, by not having doors, by not having any way of controlling the way sound traveled in the office, it stopped facilitating the thing it was supposed to facilitate, which was communication, because it became harder to communicate in an office environment where phones were ringing off the hook, where you could hear typewriters across the room, and things like that. It wasn’t actually the utopian space that it promised to be. In fact, it was deeply debilitating in some ways for the kind of work that people wanted to do.

Meanwhile, there was an American named Robert Propst working for the Herman Miller furniture company, in Michigan.

SAVAL: He was not himself trained as a designer. He was sort of like a freelance thinker.

Propst was intrigued by the “office landscape” idea — its openness and egalitarian aspirations — but he also appreciated its practical shortcomings.

SAVAL: And he decided to turn to experts — to anthropologists, to social psychologists, to people of that nature.

After some research, Propst came to the conclusion that individuals are — well, they’re individuals. And they need more control over their workspace. He and the designer George Nelson came up with a new design in which each office worker would be surrounded by a suite of objects to help them work better. In 1964, Herman Miller debuted the “Action Office.”

SAVAL: There was a standing desk, a regular desk that you sat at, and a telephone booth.

Design critics loved the Action Office.

SAVAL: It looked incredible, but it was very expensive and very few managers wanted to spend this kind of money on their employees. So they went back to the drawing board and they tried to come up with something cheaper.

In 1968, Herman Miller released the Action Office 2.

SAVAL: And it was this three-walled space: these fabric-wrapped walls that were angled, and they were meant to enclose a suite of furniture. And it was meant to mitigate the kind of chaos that an open office plan might otherwise have.

You may know the Action Office 2 by its more generic name …

SAVAL: … Which is the cubicle.

The cubicle promised a variety of advantages.

SAVAL: It’s meant to be very flexible, and it can form an impromptu conference room. And it was meant to divide up an open office plan in a way to mitigate the kind of chaos that an open office plan or an office landscape might otherwise have. And it was incredibly well-received. It was copied by a number of furniture companies. And soon it was spreading in offices everywhere.

But the cubicle could also be exploited.

SAVAL: It became a perfect tool for cramming more and more workers into less and less space very cheaply. The whole notion of what Propst was trying to do was to give a worker a space that they could control — was turned into the exact opposite. It was clear that his concept had become the most-loathed symbol of office life.

Indeed, the revolutionary, freedom-giving cubicle came to be seen as a sort of corporate version of solitary confinement. This left Robert Propst most unhappy.

SAVAL: And he blamed managers. He blamed people who were not enlightened, that created what he called barren, rat-hole-type environments.

Robert Propst, like the Schnelle brothers before him, had not quite succeeded in creating a vibrant and efficient open office. Their new environments introduced new problems: chaos in the first case, cubicles in the second. As with many problems that we humans try to correct — whether in office culture, or society at large — the correction turns out to be an overcorrection. Unintended consequences leap out, and humble us. And yet: in this case, the fact is that most offices today are still open offices. Why are we holding on to this concept if it makes so many people so unhappy?

TURBAN: If you’re looking purely at a cost per square foot, having an open office is cheaper.

BERNSTEIN: There are a lot of people, whether they’re managers or employees, who like the open office.

Bernstein admits that managers are primarily impressed by the cost savings of an open office. But some employees …

BERNSTEIN: … Some employees like it because they have visions of it being more vibrant, more interactive. That fun, noisy, experiential place they’re hoping for once you take down the walls and make everyone able to see each other.

TURBAN: And there’s also been a big push around these collisions that have emerged in social sciences. How do you create these random interactions between people that spark creativity?

“Collision” is a term you hear a lot in office design and the design of public spaces generally. It’s the promise that unplanned encounters can lead to good things — between co-workers or neighbors, even strangers. Conversations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened; the exchange of ideas; unforeseen collaboration. Now, the office is plainly a different sort of space from the public square. The office is primarily concerned with productivity. We’d all like to be happy working in our offices, but is it maybe worth surrendering a bit of happiness — and privacy, and so on — for the sake of higher productivity? After all, that’s what we’re being paid for.

BERNSTEIN: If you want to have a certain kind of interaction that’s deep, productive in idea generation, or in something that requires us to have lots of “bandwidth” between each other, it’s nice to have that face-to-face interaction.

Ben WABER: Face-to-face conversations are so important.

That’s Ben Waber, he’s the C.E.O. of an organizational-analytics company called Humanyze.

WABER: What we do is use data about how people interact and collaborate at work. Think email, chat, meeting data, but now also sensor data about how people interact in the real world. And we use that to understand really what goes on inside companies.

Humanyze has developed sociometric I.D. badges, embedded with sensors, to capture these data.

WABER: We have by far the largest data set on workplace interaction in the world.

And what do the data say about face-to-face communication?

WABER: In all of our research, that has consistently been the most predictive factor of almost any organizational outcome you can think of: performance, job satisfaction, retention, you name it. People did evolve for millions of years to interact in a face-to-face way. We are very used to small changes in facial expression, small changes in tone of voice and that’s particularly important in work contexts where high levels of trust, especially as work gets more and more complex, and the things we build and make together are more and more complex. Really having that trust and being able to convey really rich information is critical.

Bernstein and Turban also believe in the value of face-to-face communication.

TURBAN: Nuanced communication around, “Here’s a proposal I have. Here is a thought I have about how this last meeting went.” That is a very rich and nuanced form of communication and most literature suggests that face-to-face communication is much better at that.

BERNSTEIN: Sociologists have suggested for a long time that propinquity breeds interaction — propinquity being co-location, being close to one another.

TURBAN: The closer two people are together, the more likely they are to interact, the more likely they are to get married, the more likely they are to work together.

BERNSTEIN: And interaction being, we will have a conversation, we will actually get some kind of collaboration done between the two of us.

TURBAN: You can look at slouching shoulders, you can see what is their facial expression, and that conveys a lot of information that is really hard to convey, no matter how good you are at emojis — and let me tell you, I am pretty good at emojis.

Okay, so face-to-face communication is important, at least for some purposes and on some dimensions. And an open office is designed to facilitate more face-to-face communication. So … does it work? That was the central question of Bernstein and Turban’s study.

DUBNER: In your study, there are two companies that were transitioning to open offices. First of all, can you reveal the identity of one or both of those companies?

BERNSTEIN: I can’t. In order to do this study, we had to agree to a level of confidentiality. I will say that we had a choice of sites to study and we chose the two that we thought would be most representative of the kind of work we were interested in, which is white-collar work in professional settings, Fortune 500 companies.

DUBNER: Can you give us some detail that helps us envision the kind of office and what the activities are?

BERNSTEIN: If you work in a global headquarters amongst a series of functions like H.R. or finance or legal or sales or marketing, this would describe your work setting.

DUBNER: And can you describe, for the two companies that you studied, they moved to open offices — what was their configuration beforehand?

BERNSTEIN: Everyone was in cubicles. And then they moved to an open space that basically mimicked that, but just without the cubicle walls.

TURBAN: Those barriers went down, so you could see if John was sitting next to Sally before, and there was a wall between them, that John could see Sally and Sally could see John, and that was the big difference between the original and the office afterwards.

DUBNER: So, tell us about the experiment. I want to know all kinds of things, like how many people were involved? Did they opt in or not? Was it randomized? How the data were gathered, and so on.

TURBAN: In the first study, we had 52 participants; in our second, we had 100 participants, and we wanted to measure communication before and after the move.

BERNSTEIN: We started with the most simple empirical puzzle we could start with, which was simply how much interaction takes place between the individuals before and after. We wanted to purely see if this hypothesis of a vibrant open office were true.

TURBAN: So before the move, we gave each of the participants sociometric badges.

These are the badges we mentioned earlier, from Humanyze.

BERNSTEIN: So they contain several sensors. One is a microphone. One is an I.R. sensor to show whether or not they’re facing another badge. They have an accelerometer to show movement and they have a Bluetooth sensor to show location.

TURBAN: So you can get a data point which looks like: “John spoke with Sally for 25 minutes at 2 p.m.” But you don’t know anything about what the content of the conversation is.

BERNSTEIN: A number of previous studies that have used the sociometric badges have shown that we are very aware of them for the first, say, few minutes that we have them on, and after that we sort of forget they’re there.

DUBNER: You write that the microphone is only registering that people talk and not recording or monitoring what they say. Do you think the employees who wore them believe that? I mean if I think there’s a one percent chance that my firm is monitoring or recording what I’m saying, I’m quite likely to say less, yes?

BERNSTEIN: Well, it’s actually kind of a funny question, because in this case we really weren’t. But look, we phrased the consent form as strongly as we could to ensure that they understood this was for research purposes, and if they hadn’t believed it, they probably would have opted out.

DUBNER: What are we to make of the fact that the data represents the people who opted in only? Because I’m just running through my head, if I were an employee and I’m told that there’s some kind of experiment going on with these smart people from Harvard Business School and, however much you tell me or don’t, I intuit some or I figure out some or I guess some. And we’re moving to an open office and I think, “Oh, man, I hate the open office and therefore I definitely want to participate in this experiment so that I can sabotage it by behaving exactly the opposite of how I think they want me to behave.” Is that too skeptical or cynical?

BERNSTEIN: Boy, you sound like one of my reviewers in the peer review process.

DUBNER: Sorry.

BERNSTEIN: It is a valid concern. Let me tell you what we’ve tried to do to alleviate it. The first thing is we’ve compared the individuals who opted in to wearing the badge and those who did not to a series of demographics we got from the H.R. systems. And we don’t see systematic differences there.

TURBAN: It is always possible when you’re doing social science research that someone makes a guess, whether it’s accurate or not, about what this study is trying to understand, and then takes a personal stand and says, “I’m going to stand for what’s right, and what’s right is cubicles!” In that case, they would have to have done that for every day for two months. So it would have been a remarkable feat of endurance. We don’t think that that’s what happened, but the open office factions are real, so, definitely important to keep in mind.

In addition to all these data from the employees’ badges, the researchers could also measure each employee’s electronic communications — their emails and instant messages. Again, they were only measuring this communication, not examining the content.

BERNSTEIN: And so what we were able to do is compare individuals’ face-to-face and electronic communication before and after the move from cubicles to open spaces in these two environments.

Okay, so the Bernstein-Turban study looked at two Fortune 500 companies where employees had moved from cubicles to open offices. And they measured every input they could about how the employees’ communication changed — face-to-face and electronic communication. What do you think happened?

*      *      *

DUBNER: So, you’ve done the study, two firms over a period of time with a number of people to measure how their behavior changes, generally. Tell us what you found.

TURBAN: So, the study had two main conclusions.

BERNSTEIN: We found that when these individuals moved from closed cubicles into the open office, interaction decreased.

TURBAN: Face-to-face communication decreased by about 70 percent in both of our two studies. Conversely, that communication wasn’t entirely lost. Instead, the second result that we found was that communication actually increased virtually, so people emailed more, I.M.’ed more.

DUBNER: How much of that decrease was compensated by electronic?

TURBAN: We saw an increase of 20–50 percent of electronic communication. That means more emails, more I.M.’s. And depending on how you think about what an email is worth, maybe you could say that they made up for it. Is an email worth five minutes of conversation, is it two minutes?

BERNSTEIN: It’s a little bit hard to say, because an email and an interaction may not be comparable in item.

TURBAN: Even if we saw an increase in the amount of virtual communication, which totally made up for the face-to-face communication, what you probably saw was a loss in richness of communication — the net information that’s being conveyed was actually less.

DUBNER: What can you tell us about how the open space affected productivity and satisfaction?

BERNSTEIN: I’ll come out clean and say, we don’t have perfect data on performance, and we don’t have any data on satisfaction. We purposefully stayed away from satisfaction; we just wanted to look at the interaction of individuals. In one of our two studies, we have anecdotally some information where the organization felt that actually performance had declined as a result of this move.

I will say that, boy, if we think about this, there are probably lots of contexts that we can think of where more face-to-face interaction would be useful and lots of contexts in which we think more face-to-face interaction would not be useful. And that’s where I’d actually prefer to take the conversation about productivity. That, at the very least, to date managers of property, managers of organizations have not thought about this being a trade off. They’ve assumed cost and revenue go together. That may be true in some subset of environments, but in others that’s not going to be true.

DUBNER: What did the companies in your study do after you’d presented them with your findings?

BERNSTEIN: One of them has actually taken a step back from the open office. The other has attempted to make the open office work by adding more closed spaces to it.

Okay, so an empirical study of open offices finds that the primary benefit they are meant to confer — more face-to-face communication and the good things such communication can lead to — that it actually moves in the opposite direction! At least in the aggregate. To be fair, an open office is bound to be much better for certain tasks than others. And, more important, better for some people than for others. We’re not all the same. And some of us, I’m told — not me, but some of us — thrive in a potentially chattier office. But on balance, it would appear that being put out in the open leads most people to close themselves off a bit. Why? You can probably answer that question for yourself. But Turban and Bernstein have some thoughts too. Here’s one: maybe you don’t want to disturb other people:

TURBAN: So, when you’re in an open office, your voice carries. And I think people decide very reasonably to say, “Well I could speak with Tammy, who’s three desks away. But if I talk to Tammy, I’m going to disrupt Larry and Katherine, and so I will send her a quick message instead.”

Or maybe you compensate for the openness of the open office with behavior that sends a do-not-disturb signal.

BERNSTEIN: If everyone can see you, you want to signal to everyone that you are a hard worker, so you look intensely at your screen. Maybe you put on headphones to block the noise. Guess what? When we signal that, we also tend to signal, “And please don’t interrupt me from my work.” Which may very well have been part of what happened in our studies here.

And then there’s what Ethan Bernstein calls “the transparency paradox.”

BERNSTEIN: Very simply, the transparency paradox is the idea that increasingly transparent, open, observable workplaces can create less transparent employees.

For instance: let’s say you’ve been really productive all morning; now you want to take a break. You want to check your fantasy-football lineup; you want to look up some recipes for dinner. But you don’t want everyone in the office, especially your boss, to see what you’re doing. So: you do it anyway but you’re constantly looking over your shoulder in case you need to shut down the fantasy-football or recipe tabs.

BERNSTEIN: That has implications for productivity, because we spend time on it. We spend energy on it. We spend effort on it. We tend to believe these days that we get our best work done when we can be our authentic selves. Very few of us get up on a stage in front of a large audience, which is somewhat of how some people encounter the open office, and feel we can be our authentic selves.

BLOOM: So, if I have an idea …

That’s the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom.

BLOOM: … if I go discuss with my colleague or my manager in an open office, I’m terrified that other people would hear. They may pass judgment or rumors can go around.

Bloom has studied this realm for years:

BLOOM: I work a lot on firms and productivity, so what makes some firms more productive, more successful. What makes other firms less successful.

DUBNER: So let me ask you this: a recent paper found that a couple of Fortune 500 companies who switched from cubicles to an open office plan with the hopes of increasing employee collaboration, that in fact the openness led to less collaboration. So, knowing what you know about offices and people, does that surprise you?

BLOOM: Not really. There’s a huge problem with open offices in terms of collaboration. You have no privacy. Whereas if it’s in a slightly more closed environment it’s easier to discuss ideas, to bounce things around.

Or consider the ultimate closed environment: your own home.

BLOOM: One piece of research I did that connected very much to the open office was the benefits of working from home. So working from home has a terrible reputation amongst many people. The nickname “shirking from home.” So I decided to do a scientific study. So we got a large online travel agency to ask a division who wanted to work from home. And we then had them randomize employees by even or odd birthdays into working at home versus working in the office.

DUBNER: Now, this was a travel agency in China, correct?

BLOOM: Yes, so it’s Ctrip, which is China’s largest travel agency. It’s very much like Expedia in the U.S. And stunningly what came out was, one of the biggest driving factors is, it’s just much quieter working from home. They complained so often about the amount of noise and disruption going on in the office. They’re all in an open office and they tell us about people having boyfriend problems, there’s a cake in the breakout room. The World Cup sweepstake. I mean, the most amazing was the woman that told us about her cubicle neighbor who’d have endless conversations with her mum about medical problems, including horrible things like ingrown toenails and some kind of wart issue. I mean what could be more distracting than that? Not surprisingly, in that case, the open office was devastating for her productivity.

DUBNER: So, you find that overall, working from home raises what exactly? Is it productivity? Is it happiness?

BLOOM: So we found working from home raises productivity by 13 percent. Which is massive. That’s almost an extra day a week. So a), much more productive, massively more productive, way more than anyone predicted. And b), they seemed a lot happier; their attrition rates, so how frequently they quit. Part of this was they didn’t have the commute and all the uncertainty. And they didn’t have to take sick days off. But the other big driver is it’s just so much quieter at home.

DUBNER: You also do write, though, that one of the downsides of working from home was promotion became less likely. Yes?

BLOOM: Yes. We don’t know why, but one argument is “out of sight, out of mind.” They just get forgotten about. And another story would be that actually they need to develop skills of human capital and relationship capital, therefore you need to be in the office to get that, to be promoted. And then the third reason I heard, we talked to people working at home and they’d say, “I don’t want to be promoted, because in order to be promoted, I need to come in the office more so.” I’m happy where I am. It’s not worth it.

DUBNER: “I just want them to leave me alone.”

BLOOM: I mean, the most surprising thing from the Ctrip working-from-home experiment was after the end of the nine months, Ctrip was so happy. They were saving about $2,000 per employee working from home because they are more productive and they saved in office space. So they said, “Okay, everyone can now work from home.” And we discovered of the people in the experiment, about 50 percent of them who had been at home decided to come back into the office. And that seemed like an amazing decision because they’re now choosing to commute for something like 40 minutes each way a day. And also since they are less productive in the office and about half their pay was bonus pay, they’re getting paid less. All in all we calculated, their time and pay was kind of falling by 10 to 15 percent. But they were still coming in. And the reason they told us is it was lonely at home.

So people always joke the three great enemies of working from home is the fridge, the bed, and the television. And some people can handle that and others can’t. And you don’t really know until you have tried it. So what happens is people try it and some people love it and are very productive. Great, they just stick with it, and others try and they loathe it and they come back into the office.

The more you learn about the productivity and happiness of office workers in different settings, the more obvious it is that one key ingredient is often overlooked: choice. Some employees really might be better off at home; others might prefer the cubicle; and some might thrive in an open office. You also have to acknowledge that no one environment will be ideal for every task.

Janet POGUE McLAURIN: So if you stop and think about: how do we spend our time? About half of our time is spent in focus mode, which means that we’re working alone; a little over a quarter of our time is working with others in person; and about 20 percent is working with others virtually.

That’s Janet Pogue McLaurin, from the global design-and-architecture firm Gensler.

POGUE McLAURIN: I’m one of our global workplace practice area leaders.

Given the diversity of tasks required of the modern office worker …

POGUE McLAURIN: … You need the best environment for the task at hand. So, if you’re getting ready to go onto a conference call, instead of taking it at your desk, you may go into a conference room. When you finish that, you may go back to your desk to catch up on email. You may socialize around the cafe area or even take a walking meeting outside. We need to have all these other work settings at our disposal to be able to create a wonderful work experience.

That doesn’t sound so hard, does it? So how do you create that? Let’s start with the basics. Pogue McLaurin acknowledges that many open offices don’t address their key shortcoming.

POGUE McLAURIN: The biggest complaint that we see in open offices that don’t work is the noise. And how do you mitigate noise interruptions and distractions? And that can be noise as well as visual. Being able to design a space that zones the floor in smaller neighborhoods, that tries to get buffers between noisy activities. There’s architectural interventions we can also do, with ceilings and materials and white noise, that may be added to the space. And it’s not about creating too quiet an environment — that can be just as ineffective as a noisy environment. You really want to have enough buzz and energy, but just not hear every word.

You also want to account for what economists call heterogeneous preferences, and what normal people call individual choice.

POGUE McLAURIN: Choice is one of the key drivers of effective workspace, and we have found that the most innovative firms actually offer twice as much choice and exercise on that choice than non-innovative firms do. And choice is really around autonomy, about when and where to work. It could be as simple as having a choice of being able to do focus work in the morning or being able to work at home a day, or in another work setting in the office.

To that end, no two employees are exactly alike — and, more important, no two companies are alike either.

POGUE McLAURIN: I think some common mistakes that organizations do is they try to copy someone else’s design. So if you think it’s a cool idea of something that you saw on the west coast, let’s say it’s a tech firm, and you’re not even a tech firm, and you’re sitting here on the east coast and you try to just copy it verbatim, it doesn’t work. It’s got to reflect how your organization works and the purpose and brand and community that you’re a part of.

So oftentimes, companies would start to adopt what other organizations are doing and say, “Yes, that will save us space, so let’s adopt it,” but they’re missing out by not providing all these other spaces to balance. So they want the efficiency without creating all the other work settings that people need in order to be truly productive.

It’s worth noting that Janet Pogue McLaurin, a principal with a design-and-architecture firm, is arguing that the key to a successful office is: design and architecture. But it’s also worth noting that her firm has done a great deal of research in all different kinds of offices, all different kinds of companies, all over the world.

POGUE McLAURIN: We’ve done several studies in the U.S. and the U.K. But we’ve also done Latin America, Asia, Middle East and we’re just completing a study in Germany.

So: what’s her prognosis for the long-maligned open office?

POGUE McLAURIN: The open office is not dead. Oftentimes people say,“Which is better: private office or open plan?” We measured all types of individual work environments, and what we’ve found is that if you solve for design, noise, and access to people and resources, they perform equally, and one is essentially not better than the other. And the best open plan can be as effective as a private one. And that was a surprise. I love data when it tells you something unexpected.

So do we, Janet Pogue McLaurin. So do we.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins and Zack Lapinski. We had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Ethan Bernstein, associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.

Nicholas Bloom, economist at Stanford University.

Janet Pogue McLaurin, principal at Gensler.

Nikil Saval, author and journalist.

Stephen Turban, writer and analytics fellow at McKinsey & Company.

Ben Waber, president and C.E.O. of Humanyze.

RESOURCES

“Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,” Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, Zhichun Jenny Ying (2013).

“The Impact of the Open Workspace on Human Collaboration,” Ethan Bernstein, Stephen Turban (2018).

The Office: A Facility Based on Change by Robert Propst (Herman Miller 1968).

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval (Anchor 2014).

EXTRA

“Are We in a Mattress-Store Bubble?” Freakonomics Radio (2016).

“Time to Take Back the Toilet,” Freakonomics Radio (2014).

The post Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be (Ep. 358) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/open-offices/

[recentanimenews]

INTERVIEW: DARLING in the FRANXX Creators Talk Franxx, TRIGGER, and Zero Two!

As previously mentioned, the DARLING in the FRANXX trio of Atsushi Nishigori, Masayoshi Tanaka, and Yuichi Fukushima were one of the biggest attractions at Crunchyroll Expo 2018! The director, character designer, and producer--respectively--hosted two panels going over the creation of one of the biggest hit anime of 2018. They were also kind enough to give me an entire hour of their time to answer some of my own burning questions about the landmark mecha collaboration. Here's the full interview where we go over the concept, production, and designs of DARLING in the FRANXX!

How did A-1 and TRIGGER end up working together on the project?

Atsushi Nishigori: I used to work at GAINAX and a lot of my peers moved to TRIGGER while I was working on IdolM@aster. Now I’m nearing 40, most of my co-workers are moving up and directing their own shows, so I felt like this might be one of my last few chances to gather my favorite staff members and create something together.

Since GAINAX was very good at action and giant robot anime and A-1 is better at everyday life and more subtle dramas, I felt that gathering this group of staff together would allow me to do what I envisioned.

I also hadn’t had the chance yet to work with the talented Tanaka-san, so I felt it would be a good challenge for me to add new blood into my group of favorites.

Can you tell me a bit about how you came up with the concept for the series?

Nishigori: It basically started with my thought “what can I make with this staff?” The fortes of the staff that I gathered are robots and everyday life The concept was a natural result of the staff I had gathered and also the thought that I don’t feel it has been done very well in the past few years. It definitely came afterwards, however. First the staff, then the concept.

As the Director, Storyboard Artist and Writer, you played many major roles in this anime project. How did you manage all three roles?

Nishigori: The hard part of a completely original series is portraying the vision of the director to the staff. If the staff doesn’t have the correction vision, they’ll just take bits and pieces from other shows and create something that’s very common. I didn’t want that, so I had get the point across to my staff before my viewers. That’s why, in the first half, I had to do everything myself so the staff could see what I envisioned.

Once the staff sees my vision, then I can leave them to do whatever they want. As the case with Tanaka-san, once he knew my intentions, I can let him be free with it.

During the Anime Expo TRIGGER panel some original concepts for the FRANXX were shown off which were much more traditionally mecha. Can you tell me how they came to the more organic design?

Nishigori: The early designs were very “robot” robot but, in adding all the dramatic essences and emotions of everyday life in the characters, I felt that the two weren’t meshing. We started brainstorming and thought “does it really have to be robots? How can we portray the idea that robots and pilots are one and the same?” and that's how it evolved into a more organic form which, in the end, turned out to be very symbolic for the series.

Did this require a lot of collaboration between character and mech design? Making sure the mechs and pilots had similar features?

Nishigori: Yes. The armor and silhouettes ended up having more imagery from girls clothing such as skirts and puffed shoulders. Traditionally robots are very wild, rough, and cool looking. I wanted to have the concept of beauty and the final designs seemed to be more suited for the show and what I was envisioning.

The one concept I had was the staff would all be working together on the production. Despite the fact that Shinzo Koyama-san was the mech designer, he was working as a team with Tanaka-san so that they could develop their ideas together. I didn’t want it so the the character designer has nothing to do with mech designs. They’re not separate things. Everyone is integrated and has a sense of why they are doing what they’re doing.

What was the collaborative process like for Tanaka-san? Did you have to adapt any early character designs to match the mechs?

Tanaka: There weren’t that many changes to the characters themselves, but the design team had a lot of influence in slight changes in the piloting suits and the cockpit designs.

DARLING in the FRANXX is atypical as a collaboration across multiple studios. Can you tell me about how the production played out?

Yūichi Fukushima: There were times when the director and main staff would go to TRIGGER to have meetings or vice versa, but the actual production work was done in each studio with their staff, so there wasn’t too much intermingling beyond that.

What was it like working with the two different studios?

Fukushima: They’re very different and how they managed their time and workflow were also very different. The hardest part as the producer was finding ways to mesh together the two different processes to work as one.

Did the studios come together for a wrap party when it was all over?

Fukushima: We did have a wrap party with the two studios gathering together to have fun.

Tanaka: For the final episode we also gathered both studios together for a viewing party when it was broadcast.

Given the success of the project, can you see pursuing similar collaborations in the future?

Fukushima: It’d be nice, but it’s very hard to say. In this particular case we thought it could work using the action from TRIGGER and the drama from A-1. It could be the other way around might be interesting with TRIGGER doing everyday life while A-1 does action. It’s very good for the industry and interesting as a project when you can highlight the unique characteristics of a studio in a particular anime, but the process of collaborating between studios is very difficult. We were thinking “how realistic is this?” and essentially winging it because we weren’t sure how much we could do.

Did a lot of work go into transitioning between the unique looks of each studio within episodes?

Nishigori: It’s more of a feeling of “this is this” and “that is that.” I didn’t strive for it to be a perfect homogenous mixture, but more just cramming in everything that I like. So it’s not going to be streamlined but I put in everything I liked. If it works, it works or, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and that’s how it goes.

Zero Two is rare for being such a recognizable centerpiece of the cast and her design has a lot of fans. Can you tell me a bit about your intentions going into her design?

Tanaka: The design team was focused on what sort of existence Zero Two is more than what she looks like, but we had the vague image of a badass transfer student that’s kind of devilish and acts as a tempstress to Hiro. At the same time we wanted her to be very iconic of the series so we started adding things here and there like pink hair and eye shadow to make her stand out.

Nishigori: With most of the other characters we thought about how much we could take away from them without compromising their core design, but with Zero Two the idea was to just toss everything in and keep adding until we reach critical mass and can’t add anymore.

Tanaka: We really hoped the viewers would like her enough that they would cosplay her. Since we’re seeing a lot of cosplay and the nature of your question itself was about how iconic she is, I feel the concept we had in the beginning was a success.

How about True Apus? Was that more of a Tanaka or Koyama design?

Nishigori: One of the first concepts we had was that Zero Two would become a giant robot in the end. We had a lot of meetings with Koyama-san and had to think about how we would bring her back from the final battle. I mean, she’s a giant robot. It was kind of weird to leave that as the final form, so we thought “why don’t we create a form which is her most beautiful form?” and that’s how she ended up wearing the wedding gown. She couldn’t turn into a human in the end, but she was still in the most beautiful state she could be, so it was more of a design concept.

Sci Fi as a genre often comments on modern issues. The armageddon that exists within the world of DARLING in the FRANXX seems to have been brought about by humanity losing its ability to reproduce. Was this inspired by current issues in Japan?

Nishigori: It wasn’t really devised as a social commentary, but a depiction of the current environment that I’ve been in and am feeling. It’s not exactly Japan now, but it’s what I feel living my everyday life looking at the people around me. It’s a world without adults or people to teach morals to others. More of a thought regarding what I see as opposed to what Japan’s society as a whole is.

Mecha and environmentalism also aren’t exactly strangers. Was the destruction of the environment by the claiming of Magma energy also based on your personal perceptions or as a greater theme?

Nishigori: That may have been something we played with, but wasn’t a primary issue. Problems caused by the lack of fuel resources and overpopulation are fairly common in storytelling. Instead, all of that was included to show what kind of environment the protagonists grew up in. If it was possible, we’d draw everything within only a 5 meter radius of the children, but you have to show some sort of minimal depiction of the conditions they’re in to see where they’re coming from.

There was an early arc in which Ikuno was unable to take on the role of stamen since it’s impossible for girls, but we later see the 9s were able to swap positions. When I first saw that I thought “that’s not fair!” Was there something different about them that let them do that?

Nichigori: The 9s were definitely perfect, but is perfect good? One of the key concepts for the series was having a twisted personality like Ikuno or trying to do everything for the person you love only for it to backfire like Ichigo is human and being human is good. My thinking was that I’ve lost if everyone thinks the 9s are so perfect so they must be better. Being perfect is not fun, humans have emotions. They’re going to laugh, they’re going to cry. That’s one of the concepts I wanted to portray to the younger audience.

High production mecha series, especially ones using 2D animation for the mechs, are becoming rarer but DARLING in the FRANXX felt like a very confident production. Was there a lot of confidence going into this project despite the trajectory of the industry?

Nichigori: It’s getting harder to find mecha animators since the industry is moving toward 3D. Since one of the concepts was character equals robot, we wanted a more warm feeling. We wanted the robots to be big and have action, but also that characters were more robots than characters. That’s the feeling we went in with.

DARLING in the FRANXX has been very popular in the west. Have you noticed a greater fan reaction from overseas?

Nishigori: You might know better since you’re from here. Maybe you could tell me?

Definitely very popular.

Any final thoughts of messages you’d like to give your fans?

Fukushima: This is a very unique point in my career having such unique talent such a Tanaka-san and everyone at TRIGGER and A-1. It was very overwhelming and I don’t know if I’m going to have a project like this again in my career. It’s definitely been my favorite project, so I hope everyone enjoys it and loves it just like I do.

Tanaka: Looking at all the tweets out there, I noticed there was a lot of reactions from overseas and I didn’t realize there was such passion from overseas fans. It was kind of like a lightbulb for me. We’ve been doing what we wanted to do for a long time but it was thinking more about just the Japanese audience. This was a good catalyst for me to know how what I work on is perceived by the world.

Zero Two’s design is definitely one of the more popular parts.

Tanaka: Ah, thank you.

Nishigori: I agree with Tanaka-san that the overseas reaction was a lot larger than expected and a lot of it was different from the Japanese audience, whether it be good or bad. The overseas fans seem to have a bigger voice than the Japanese fans. They’re more loud. The fact that there wasn’t much time lag between the Japanese and overseas reactions gave the feeling that simulcast is closing that distance. It’s something to keep in mind that my target audience is no longer 100 million, but up to 6 billion. It’s worldwide.

Having grown up as a Japanese person, I can’t really switch to a global mindset immediately, but now that I have knowledge that there is such a big audience out there that I haven’t really thought about, it’s a very happy feeling that I can create for more people.

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Peter Fobian is an Associate Features Editor for Crunchyroll, author of Monthly Mangaka Spotlight, writer for Anime Academy, and contributor at Anime Feminist. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com