Beyond The Desk: Designing For Cognitive Resilience in the New Work-From-Home

Beyond The Desk: Designing for cognitive resiliance in the new Work-From-Home

Patrick Baca-Chandler

Edited By: Jennifer Schifano

Designed/Written By: Patrick Baca-Chandler

Introduction 01 Research 02 Initial Prototyping 03 Users 04 Ponder 05 Opus 06 Terra 07

Introduc

Introduction: I was taught to be obsessive from a very young age. I understood that there were levels of achievement and that in order to achieve happiness in life I had to strive to achieve the highest level of achievement in everything I did. I internalized this as being literally everything I did from getting up at the right time in the morning, saying the right thing, and doing the right thing in every moment that I was awake during the day.

Once I made a mistake as humans do I felt as if I came short of what I could have achieved. This was all the while made more powerful due to my proclivity to keep to myself. I have never unlearned this obsessive behavior and it has led me to great heights and even greater lows. I so often wish it was different, that my subconscious brain had not latched on to this idea of peak achievement taught to me by my mother. I understand, however, that we can’t go about regretting what has already happened and we must take everything as a learning experience.

I never understood how one would be able to consistently function that they inherently knew and we’re able to follow a routine. I was never able to follow routine, only following that which gave me the most immediate sense of satisfaction. This has served me well because it has given me a keen sense of right and wrong when it comes to physical form. By far this has been my most developed skill in life, one of which I am quite proud of. A skill I am not that proud of is time management.

I was always so focused on the here and now, on the split second that is this very moment, that thinking towards the future or remembering what I learned in

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the past was incredibly difficult. This focus on the here and now, while it had its drawbacks, also has its advantages, because t’s allowed me to become very good at grounding myself within a meditative practice. This meditative practice has been a part of my routine ever since I started showing symptoms of anxiety disorder, as it helped to calm me down and to realize that things aren’t always as bad as I made them out to be. It helped to broaden the split second of the here and now. This became the biggest most impactful thing to happen in my life. This became very important in a particular evolution of my thesis experience that I will detail in a later chapter.

My journey through school was fairly automatic. I moved from one grade to the next doing what I had to to get the good grade in the class so that my parents would be proud of me so that I would be successful, but most importantly, so I could get out of that class and start summer break. I never really thought what would happen after school. I would listen to my friends talk about their plans, leaving me aghast as to how they could manage thinking that far ahead. It then came to my senior year of high school. I applied to my hometown college and was thankful that the end of highschool had arrived. I eventually started school at the University of New Mexico. I studied one thing and then the next. Filtering aimlessly through the halls, trying to find an anchor in what to do. All of this is to say I’ve constantly felt unprepared for what was ahead and was never able to develop a work habit work habits like my peers.

Looking back through my life as I have just briefly

described to you, I was wholly at a loss for what to draw from when I was asked what I wanted to spend a year researching, making, and drawing conclusions about.

That is until I thought about the moment in which I knew that I wanted to be a designer. I was in lecture hall 205, chemistry 201, on track to graduate with a biology degree. I had become increasingly unhappy and uncomfortable in my everyday life because I felt like I was forcing myself to do something I wasn’t meant to do.

As I was writing down notes on molecular structures of pathogens, I connected something in my brain. I had always been interested in art from a very young age. As I had said my eye for physical form had been attuned due to my obsessive behaviors and at the same time I wasn’t brave enough to just choose being an artist as a career path. This was mainly because I was always told and by my parents and by media that being an artist would be incredibly difficult and I would have a low chance of success. So naturally being someone that lived for the satisfaction of immediate achievement, I decided that this was not a possibility. This was why I chose the sciences to study because it felt like such a surefire way for me to be successful in life. What I thought of in that lecture hall was what if I could combine the two. What if there was something that I could do that was both art and science. I jumped onto Google and searched what profession is focused between art and science and with supreme immediacy an answer returned, that being a product designer. This was a field that I didn’t know one could go into and, being from a fairly small town, I had never run into anyone that had

been successful at being one, but in that moment that made all the sense in the world to me. So much so that I would write a note on my phone that said “you are a designer, It’s what you’re meant to do”. And I set it to remind me that every day without end, it’s still reminding me to this day.

So with all of that being said, how did I land on the work-from-home employee as my focus? Well, in a sense, I pictured myself working from home sitting in the same chair every day, staring at the same computer screen every day and I thought, man isn’t this depressing? While this wasn’t based much real knowledge of a true work-from-home experience, it was a strong enough emotion for me to look further into what it was like.

The worker in the work from home setting is like every other employee and yet they want more. Right, now how much more? Not much at all, they’re simply asking for life.

They’re asking to be able to put less of themselves aside every day and be more true to who they are and while they are doing the same work that they would be doing in the office, setting changes everything. Having walls in your office is a given but having walls that gives something more to you than just a barrier is a gift.

Working from home is not just a desire to be more comfortable and have to do less work. Instead, they desire to be closer to their own truth and that’s something that I identified with. In the following pages you will come to understand the intricacies of the problems I have identified with working from home and my

proposed solutions in the form of designed products, services applications and experiences. Now, let’s get into it.

Researc

I have high expectations of myself. I will always set my sights on what the most impressive outcome would be and only be happy if those expectations are met. This has caused me a lot of stress and discomfort over the years, needing a lot of work on my end to be ok with making mistakes and not being perfect. That being said, this thesis is not perfect. It is a collection of my explorations, thoughts, outside opinions, and efforts up until this point. The research in such a case is constantly changing and can end up being circuitous in getting to a point of clarity, the journey of which I detail in the following pages.

I started my research process with an exploration of an experience I had during the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. I was in my third year of undergraduate education and I had just started to understand how I worked in the college-level school setting. This was a journey for me because, throughout high school, I was able to coast through on my abilities and not through studying, thereby never learning the study skills required for more challenging coursework. So beginning in college, I had a lot to make up for and I was able to do that by the third year, until I wasn’t. When the pandemic started I was thrown back to high school, wherein I didn’t have any bearing as to how to function in the new setting of remote school. I struggled for the rest of my time in undergraduate, experiencing serious mental turmoil along the way. It was this feeling that when I started looking into remote work as a topic, I held in the back of my mind as motivation to help people who seemed to be going through something similar.

Remote work is defined as working from somewhere

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that is not owned by the company you are working for.

This can include working from home but can also be working from anywhere that is not the office. This research is focused on the Work From Home community because this is what I was most interested in given my experience and knowledge of the problems with working from home.

I started by trying to understand the trends of Work From Home in the U.S. Before The Pandemic, roughly 10% of U.S. workers worked from home. This number had stayed roughly the same for the previous 30 years, going back to the early 1990’s. This was when office “toxicity” or toxic office culture was on the rise in the public eye and people were fed up with working in that environment. In reality, while this is a very real modern example, toxic workplace culture goes all the way back to the 17th century and the opening of the East India Companies offices on Leadenhall Street in London. This was an environment where everyone would be sitting in desks, in a grid and withstand grueling hours and horrible abuse from superiors. In the end, its a wonder that the modern office continued to evolve. However, it did, and this is the environment that Work From Home employees are escaping.

The main reason that Work From Home employees want to work from home is the savings in time in the morning (commute), childcare, being around their families, and generally more freedom in their daily lives. With that, conversations around comfort and increased ability to focus are also talked about. With a history of hundreds of years of cultural development around the office, it is no wonder that people will create a dichoto-

my of reasoning. That office culture is all bad and work from home is all good. Whenever I hear of a group of people with such strong opinions, I can’t help but be sceptical and I immediately reach out to people that study this.

I contacted Tracy Brower, VP of Workplace Insight and author of “The Secrets to Happiness at Work” and “Bring Work to Life”. In my conversation with Tracy I learned a few things that started shaping what variables were at play in my users environment. These were the importance that the physical space one occupies has on the work and the difference in stimuli within the at home workplace and the users ability to block it out. She would go further in depth by saying the dedication of the office space to work, allows one to not only feel safe in structure but also have a rigid structure for which to organize all thoughts about work. It was this that really interested me because it indicated a shift change that happens every day without really being recognized. Its within this shift change that workers change there willingness to do certain actions that one would find more difficult to do at home and develop a pattern or ritual of coming into work and orienting to ones space, further adding structure to improve cognitive ability. It was in the learning of this that I needed to verify what she was saying was actually happening.

I talked to multiple people in the Work From Home space, one CEO of a tech company out of Vietnam that is dedicated to improving the remote work culture there, and the head of people at a medtech firm. They would both paint the picture of a harsh environment for remote workers, where there exist many adversities

that are not often addressed. In talking to Daan Van Rossum, founder of Bright (Vietnams first happiness focused startup), board member and founder of Dreamplex (ready to move in co-working space), and CEO and founder of FlexOS (AI based tech startup focused on the future of work), I had my first 1st person experience of troubles with remote work. In one of our conversations, Daan recounted how there team in Vietnam is completely in person employees except for one person that is fully remote (living in the UK). This person expressed to him that she felt she was not being fairly included in every aspect of the meetings they would have or projects they would collaborate on. This allowed me to name a specific detriment to the work from home environment, that of proximity bias. This is defined as the difference in treatment of employees by the manger, influenced by there appearance in person or on screen.

I did not find this to be particularly interesting because the lack of physical presence is not made up for by the presence on a screen in terms of the emotional connection of the individual. However, this started to paint the picture of the stressors of the work from home environment. This was expanded upon when talking to Jamey Conrad, VP of people at a medtech firm. She was coming from the experience of being a remote HR representative to a hospital during the pandemic. She painted a picture of a solitary existence, where the lack of people around her is only a subtle pressure while she works, but the moment she stops working to instinctively interact with a co-worker, the realization of her reality hits all at once. I pulled from this interview a somewhat clear image of who the person is and what leads up to

the main problems that they face, catalyzing.

Opportunities: At the beginning of my journey, I had come up with an idea that I wanted to be able to build a desk for working anywhere, easily folded and extremely paired down but distinct (a distillation of my personal design language). While this did not end up pairing well with the results of my research, it was the first physicalization of my seed of a thesis idea. When moving past this and as I completed the first semester of my last year at POD, I was more focused on the individual rather than the environment. The individual I identified was wholly unprepared and suffering multiple reprocutions all rooted in the susceptibility of there cognitive resilience to fail. This is why the main focus of my solutions revolve around the strengthening of the cognitive resilience of these work-from-home individuals. With the strengthening of cognitive resilience, I found that the most effective way of strengthening this is through aging and experiencing the ups and downs of life. That being entirely unhelpful, the second best way of strengthening cognitive resilience was the daily practice of mindfulness. This made a lot of sense and I could see the potential within the practice of such, in terms of interruptions of the already identified frenzied work schedule of the work-from-home individual.

Initial Prototyp

My testing of ideas surrounding my topic started with the provotype I called “the overly opaque corporate new employee gift box (or O.O.C.N.E.G.B.). This was designed to make fun of the new employee gift box, pointing out how it is actually just a way for the company to make you feel like they care about you, when in reality you are much less important to them as a whole. While this was a satirical piece, I felt as if it started to touch on the employee-to-management relationship as a constant battle of perception of one another and a barrier of communication.

My next real world testing of my thesis came in the form of my co-creation workshop. This workshop was called “At The End Of The Day” and included activities that would allow me to better understand where my user’s pain points, positive points, and thoughts during their average daily work schedule. The first exercise had my participants list the pros and cons of remote work.

The first thing that was said by one of my participants, jokingly, was “ok, get ready to be depressed”. This struck me as a much deeper comment than the light tone it was said in. This stuck with me as they listed their pros and cons, leading to an eventual shareout after 10 minutes had passed. What was shared was to be expected, the flexibility of schedule being the No.1 pro.

The No.1 con to remote working was that there was a constant instinctual checking of slack at every hour of the day, to the point where they were upset that they did it. There was also a compulsion to work every second of the day, well beyond the end of the actual work day.

This was due to the fact that they felt pressure to “keep up”. From both of these, along with the first comment, I

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took away that despite some major detriments to remote work, they were convincing themselves that it was ok to engage in these self harming habits, for the sake of the privilege to work remotely. I find this to be very problematic because I don’t think that working from home should be viewed as something that the employer is giving to you. Reflecting back, it also seemed, from talking to my participants, that they felt this was a benefit being given to them by work and yet they were feeling behind by being away from the office. This is therefore the key takeaway of this section of the workshop, that working from home as chosen by the employee is both a gift and a curse to there mental well-being.

The next activity would entail the participants to plot out, on a provided sheet, an average day in the life of there remote job. This chart included 4 rows, arranged landscape on a sheet of 11x17 paper. The top row included a black time line from 9am-5pm. The instructions were to plot there average daily schedule, labeling the key events that occur during the day (lunch, typical daily check-in, partner returning home). They were then told to plot the pain points during the day, using a red pencil, explaining on the 2nd row a little about why it was so painful. They would do the same for positive points during the day on the next row and finally the last row included thoughts that they remember having when that action took place during the imaginary day.

I gave them about 20 minutes or so to fill this out to the best of there ability and then we regrouped to discuss what they learned. The biggest takeaways from this was the amount of times during the day that they checked slack was a lot more than they thought and

that free time was mainly spent doing activities that they started to feel was just another form of work. This was interesting because it brought up the idea of the quality of the time spent not working being more important than the amount of time spent not working. I was prompted by this to research what makes a break effective and what factor the greatest impact on its effectiveness. Looking into this, it turns out that breaks are a often misused tool. We will take them to reward ourselves or we will take them in order to avoid a task or emotion related to a task. Then I found that the most effective time to take a break is not when you most feel the need for one, but when you still have energy.

Breaking for short periods of time (5-10 minutes) in the morning, when your energy is the highest, will be the most effective in postponing the eventual decline of energy, leading to a crash in the afternoon. This was the thesis behind my first prototype of a break timer. This timer would act as a visual gauge as to when during the day will be most effective to take a break. Paired with an application that pre-submits breaks to your calendar application of choice, the break timer would update to show very simply how many breaks you had left during the day and how many you had completed. It would work by being started in the morning by the user, with the push of a button. This would start the gradual emptying of the gauge until a break came around and you would be prompted to push the button again to stop the timer and take your break. I felt as if this accurately portrayed the idea of a system that automatically plans breaks for a WFH individual, however, the quality of the execution could have been better, adding to the clarity

of the idea.

Users

The users that I designed for are not suffering. They are people who want to be more aware in living there life, for themselves as well as others. They were given that chance due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was the classic scenario in which once someone gets to experience how it is to live a certain life, they don’t wish to stop if it gives them very specific values. Therefore, my users are able to overlook a lot of problems with the way in which they are living because the good outweighs the bad. However, there are moments in which there gaze is shifted from the bright opportunity they were given and with that comes the realization of the quality of their other actions and the environment they have been living with. They are able to understand that this contentment surrounding where they are working has overshadowed how they are working, which is exactly how they did when they worked in office. Its this individual that suddenly realizes there oversight of the differences between the in office environment and the work from home environment, and the changes to there work habits necessary to thrive, that I am designing for.

The age range determined to be the most susceptible to struggling due to a lack of cognitive resilience are those that have just started a work-from-home job, or any job for that matter. These people of the 22-30 age group, are of a well-educated background, a lot coming straight out of school. They are often living alone or with friends, in a small apartment, in a metropolitan city. I chose people who live in large cities like New York not because it is where I currently exist, but because the jobs people tend to work are tech-based, knowl-

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edge-working, and of a diverse area of focus, only allowed by a large city.

Ponder

Ponder is a mindfulness object designed to be used as a focus of a daily mindfulness practice. Ponder, is made up of a spherical object with a maze style groove on the surface, about the width of a finger. A maze or labyrinth, was historically a place not of confusion or deception but of contemplation and peace. This is the exact ethos I tried to embed in this object through the use of beveled edges and an organic shape that feels good to hold. The practice designed to use with Ponder is one based on the therapeutic practice of embodied touch. By having the user focus solely on there sense of touch and the curves of the maze, they are able to reach a state of mental clarity through imaginative journey creation.

The origins of this object can be traced to troubles that work-from-home employees have in mindfully creating a schedule that is respectful of there energy levels and mental health. These employees are burdened with the need to constantly be worrying that they are falling behind there in person counterparts, leading to compulsive habits of checking slack, filling time in between working with activities in stead of focusing on taking breaks.

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Opus

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Now, let’s explore Opus. Each month, Opus delivers a carefully curated selection of items focused on engaging one sense at a time—touch, smell, sound, and more.

By inviting subscribers to explore their senses and embrace the present moment, Opus fosters a deeper connection with the environment and promotes mindfulness in everyday life. It’s not just a subscription box; it’s a journey of self-discovery and sensory exploration.

Terra

The tendancy of a remote worker to constantly be connected to the office, to where they are constantly checking slack from the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night, causes a paranoia to develop.

This was a fact that I came across when hosting my co-creation session in the fall. People were really stuck in a loop of getting up in the morning, checking slack, making breakfast, checking slack, walking to there desk, checking slack. This along with the compounding anxiety and social pressure of the work from home environment, creates a situation wrought with traps. I therefore wanted to design something that interrupted that cycle being witnessed. Therefore, due to a remote workers increased chances of prolonged heightened levels of stress and increased chance of burnout, there is opportunity to design a better way for them to manage there energy. This was the opportunity statement I started this project with, thinking through the lens of taking breaks.

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Bio Patrick is a product designer with a background in sculpture and furniture design. He is currently pursuing an MFA at The Products Of Design graduate department at The School Of Visual Arts in New York City. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, he places the love of connection, family, and friendship as the reason he makes art. His work endeavors to shed light on the discourse surrounding mental health, emphasizing its significance and advocating for a more accurate and nuanced understanding. His thesis “Beyond The Desk: Designing for increased cognitive resilience in the new work-from-home” explores the daily application of mindfulness and its potential to alleviate the challenges faced by remote workers, such as anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

His work not only emphasizes a sensory approach but also embraces a critical mindset, recognizing that understanding the world requires a multifaceted perspective. By integrating mindfulness practices, he believes that tapping into the senses can lead not only to awareness but also to solutions, fostering a deeper connection with both ourselves and the world around us.

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