The Office Jungle: A Vision for Wildness to Turn Offices into Jungles

Nieuweboer, I. , Damen, I. , Brombacher, H. , Levy, P. , Vos, S.B. & Lallemand, C. (2020). The Office Jungle: A Vision for Wildness to Turn Offices into Jungles. In Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, DIS2020 (pp. 341-344). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395818

Article

Dissertation

⌈Résumé⌋ The Office Jungle is an experimental office environment designed to make offices more “wild”. Through this demonstration and associated design vision, we make a first attempt to reflect on and to define what characterizes wildness and how it could empower people in more playful and active lifestyles, particularly in the workplace. In our understanding, wildness is not an exclusive property of nature, but rather a condition that can be designed for. How wildness can be designed is described here in a set of design principles called “Design for Wildness”, inspired by the work of Gibson. The Office Jungle, a large geodesic sphere of 2 meters in diameter, is part and parcel of these design principles and can be used as a tool to design other wild environments. Such environments could benefit people working in the office, many of whom have been suffering the consequences of a sedentary lifestyle.