Flying to Sydney for work came with the promise of exciting conversations and felt as though I fitted a week’s worth of work into a single day. In contrast, my Sisyphus goes to Sydney arrival had no meetings or conferences scheduled, nor any coffee catchups to go to. There was only one thing I had to do once I arrived in Sydney and that was to get a flight back home to Melbourne.
Flying to Sydney for work came with the promise of exciting conversations and felt as though I fitted a week’s worth of work into a single day. In contrast, my Sisyphus goes to Sydney arrival had no meetings or conferences scheduled, nor any coffee catchups to go to. There was only one thing I had to do once I arrived in Sydney and that was to get a flight back home to Melbourne.
I wondered how it would feel to arrive in Sydney under one’s own steam from the day I began planning the pilgrimage. Would I fall on my knees, raise my arms, and turn my teary face towards the sky, or do a Forrest Gump and laconically declare, “I’m pretty tired, I think I’ll go home now” [40]. I wouldn’t have to wait much longer to find out. I was on my last walking day, only 37 km away from the Sydney Opera House, my pilgrimage finishing line.
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Eight hours from the finish might seem like a long walk, but from the perspective of life at 4.6 km/h it actually felt shorter than the minutes spent waiting in a line to board a flight. My modest contribution to Learning from Las Vegas notion of speed of travel would be that in addition to symbols, our patience is also affected, but in a proportionally inverse way: increased speed results in decreased patience. At the cruising speed of jet planes (~200 times walking speed) our patience is tiny.
As I got closer to the Opera House, the long-forgotten imaginary travelling companion I’d met on day one appeared from nowhere. Once again, I was strangely compelled to follow his fast pace. On reflection, the pilgrimage was like a hard-to-chew crusty old bread sandwich with a delicious filling. The best part was the in-between, the days in the centre of my walk, but they still needed a top and bottom to hold it all together.
Finally, I took step 1,281,772 at the base of the Sydney Opera House. I was paying so much attention to how I was feeling and even how I should feel, that I am not sure how I truly felt.
What I can say is that every thought was overwhelmed by the surreal experience of finally being there. That surreal moment when the there becomes the here. I was surprised by how significant and special it felt, even though I had stood in this place many times before. Now of course, it was how I had reached the Opera House which made it feel, and look, so different.
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A lot of what we do in workplace design has to do with this formula:
B is behaviour, P is person and E is the environment.
It reads as behaviour is a function of the person and their environment and it’s the brainchild of psychologist Kurt Lewin [41]. It’s an elegant formula, but it’s also a conceptual one and cannot be used in the same way as mathematical formulae. That this is sometimes overlooked is the source of many misunderstandings in workplace design.
Designers focus their attention on the (E)nvironment side of the equation and their aim is to shape it in a way that will promote certain (B)ehaviour. Robert Bechtel’s words fit well here: “behaviour, not space, is enclosed by architecture” [42]. The (P)erson is also considered and personas are created. However, once conceived, these personas are for all intents and purposes thought to be constant – closer to demographic stereotypes, than humans.
This logic felt incredibly flawed on the steps of the Opera House, where I sat, rediscovering it as if I was looking at it for the first time.
Granted, we don’t usually go through experiences as intense as my pilgrimage on a daily basis in the workplace. However, according to Lewin, physically identical environments can feel different under much less dramatic circumstances, for instance when a person is hungry and when the person is satiated.
It then begs the question, what matters most, the qualities of the environment, or the state of the person? On this, Lewin provides the type of academic answer which frustrates many:
…depends upon the state of the person and at the same time on the environment, although their relative importance is different in different cases. [41]
Some scholars [43] have also commented that the comma between ‘P’ and ‘E’ in the formula (rather than a plus or minus sign, or any other operator) leaves their relationship open. Regardless of this, Lewin’s formula is a useful reminder and an important signpost for those working with the (E)nvironment, not to forget about the changing nature of the (P)erson.
While still meandering around the Opera House, I also thought about how unremarkable that one last step felt. It truly was remarkably similar to the step before that one, and pretty similar to the one before that. However, in between the first and the last step there were over a million and two hundred thousand of tiny and unnoticeable changes where the pilgrimage happened. Cue the song From little things, big things grow [44], but I didn’t feel any bigger, just different. The selfies, Fig. 21.1, offer a hint of some subtle physical changes, unruly hair and beard. But the photos fail to capture that it is a different (P)erson.
Fig. 21.1
Selfies at Federation Square, Melbourne, 1 July 2018 (top) –Sydney Opera House, 11 August 2018 (bottom)
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After a long, long shower at a hotel and sleeping off the tiredness of 42 days, I took a flight back to Melbourne.
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