A Spatial Narratology - Explaining a productivity relationship between humans and the interior work environments they inhabit

This research investigates a situational nexus between work productivity, spatial experience and the fulfilment of work within an office environment. The project uses the office worker as a focus for an investigation into the interactions between humans and the work environments they create and occupy. The thesis positions a new way of understanding the office interior by exploring the associations that workers develop with their place of work. Through observational analysis, the project attempts to authenticate a new office situation through an experimental approach that improves work productivity and worker satisfaction. This focuses on the determination of work experience and knowledge by utilising experiential scenarios within the workplace. At the centre of this research is a new theoretical position that recognises and embeds a spatial narrative within the work situation by extending existing spatial contexts, and develops a new critical exploration between the worker, environment and work practice. The examination of interaction between the worker and the spatial environment is applied to contextualise workplace proximity and promote positive experiences of fulfilment within the interior. There is a critique of work situations and conditions associated with the processes of office work production and how the immediate and surrounding environment affects and facilitates that activity.

The work draws on the processes of design to augment a narratological context of the workplace which develops new experimental research methodologies. The research work extends existing narrative principles into a new experiential framework that coalesces and enriches the work condition. Through the recognition of spatial narrative practice, there is identification and apperception in the diversity of how workers produce, dwell, inhabit and organise their places of work. The research defines existential principles that integrate a centralised agency of Humanism, and how this assimilates through interior space into the working world. The doctoral challenge is to explicate and establish whether the experimental findings have the capacity to validate a spatial narrative that enriches worker production and extends this evolution into the workplace.