13. Life at 4.6 km/h

Before setting out on the walk, I had read books about pilgrimages and the practicalities of long-distance trekking. I got inspiration from the former and good tips from the latter. Hot tip: if your hair stands on end, you should drop on your knees and bend forward, but not lie flat on the floor, because lightning is about to strike you.

I now recall with a smile the many times I nearly initiated the lighting strike sequence after feeling the slightest movement in my scalp on stormy days.

I also read books about sophists, epicureans, and stoics because I thought they might be good company during my pilgrimage. They were.

One text that kept coming into my mind was Learning from Las Vegas [30], which I read as an undergraduate student – over 20 years earlier but hadn’t thought about it since. The authors present an interesting analysis between the speed a person travels and how they read their environment.

In the crowded, narrow alleyways of a Middle Eastern Bazaar, the authors argue, a person travels at a walking speed of approximately 3 miles per hour (4.8 km/h). The walker can smell, see, and even touch the merchandise on offer. As the speed of the observer increases, objects are replaced by symbols that communicate the message related to the objects they replace. The substitution is necessary because communication no longer occurs in the way it does at slow speeds when we can see an apple or an orange. Moving faster, we need a symbol, the sign of a fruit shop. The size of symbols must increase with the speed of the observer for effective communication to take place.

My overall average speed walking to Sydney was 4.6 km/h, just a fraction below that of the walker in a Bazaar. I experienced life in a slowly changing environment. Yet as I travelled roads that were designed for the faster speeds of cars, objects were generally replaced by symbols. The environment I traversed was clearly designed to be experienced at greater speeds than that of a pilgrim.

As predicted, the symbols for a petrol station were visible long before a bowser came into sight. Travelling just below Bazaar speed, symbols were unnecessary, too big and visible for longer than required. Of the many symbols for petrol stations I saw, one in particular caught my attention, Fig. 13.1.

This bright pink aeroplane with its nose buried firmly in the grass beckoned me to the petrol station. Inside, were the eclectic memorabilia of boxing legends of days gone by and mementoes of singers old enough to have done comeback tours, twice-over. The narrative captured on the walls lived up to the expectations set out front by the pink aeroplane. The aircraft was a symbol of the owner’s eccentric personality, there to broadcast identity and not just point to a place to fill the tank of one’s car.

I spent an unwarranted amount of time in the eclectic shop considering that I had no car to fill up. But as the time passed, I heard the owner’s story and learnt more about the objects he’d collected. The aeroplane cost him AUD$1000, which struck me as both a bargain considering how well it acted as a symbol and also overpriced since it was mostly junk painted pink.

Can we learn a lesson about the workplace from the pink aeroplane? If so, it may be that unless we are running late for a meeting, we move through the office at a Bazaar pace of 4.8 km/h or slower and while we do, we are in close proximity to people. Therefore, one might assume symbols in the workplace are not required.

But my story of the messiest desk I have ever encountered might challenge this assumption. The desk was discovered during a workplace observation, it was buried under piles of paper and the most intriguing variety of lightbulbs one could imagine. Everything on that desk broadcasted the occupant’s job description as a senior lighting engineer with efficiency and panache.

Was this necessary? One could argue the lightbulbs were a symbol for others of what the occupant did, but they also were for him. They helped to create identity and a positive display of territoriality [31].

A tall, pink, signpost rises from this experience:

Nestled in lightbulbs was a particularly intriguing filament globe that I couldn’t take my eyes off and which blew my cover as a detached and unobtrusive observer. The occupant was quick to offer details about it with great passion, but his enthusiasm was replaced by mild resentment when he realised I was part of the design firm working on their new offices. “Are you taking away our desks?” he asked.

Although I didn’t have the heart to reveal it at the time, the answer was yes. Our data indicated the average employee did not spend enough time at their desks to each warrant precious dedicated real estate. We proposed “a change to the environment that would increase choice”, which is code for: “yes, you will lose your desk.” Ten years have passed, and while I have forgotten all the technicalities of that lightbulb, I have not forgotten the lighting engineer and his passion.

That passionate engineer is now likely without lightbulbs or his own desk.

At the time of our observations and with the understanding we had, the solution made perfect sense, but that is only if the purpose of office buildings is to fill them up with as many employees as possible. This is not meant to be a cynical remark, it’s not hard to formulate the wrong view if one is too close to the project and too immersed in the doing. Designers’ days are peppered with meetings with stakeholders who focus on square metres per person and dollars, and this takes us to an important signpost:

The key to this signpost is not to confuse practicalities such as budget and space constraints with the real purpose of the workplace.

Back on my pilgrimage, I left the petrol station and bid goodbye to its eccentric owner. As the door closed behind me, I got another warning: “camp on this side of the bridge, there are idiots on the other side.” The warnings about the idiots were piling up.