LUCAS GOLON

The regular cubicles became the symbol of discarnate work spaces that prevent people from living actual experience.

At work, at a restaurant, or in love… today everyone speaks about the experience. Sometimes emotional, sometimes professional… sometimes good, sometimes bad. Experience is in all minds and on everyone’s lips despite that anyone actually knows why or how the experience is created, is made, unmade, and remains in memory. 
We sometimes try to quantify it, to meticulously dissect it through handy satisfaction surveys. We are told about user experience, customer experience, shopping experience. Judging by our mailbox, it seems that we are living dozens of experiences each day, at the least! How haven’t we sunk into an overdose of experiences by now? And above all, what traces these experiences leave in ourselves?
If you were asked to remember a memorable experience of yours, you would probably recall a moment and a place. You would recollect a feeling at a specific moment, peculiar alchemy between time and space. 

Since the first day he entered the Roman Pantheon, the Japanese architect Tadao Ando describes this alchemy as an “experience of space”. There, he understood that our sensations varied with the light. And as true as each space is singular – by its light and its atmosphere -, each experience can only be unique. Experience is a matter of sensation: a sensation connected to space, a sensation that goes behind the use we have of a place. 

When speaking of use, today’s trend is on co-working spaces, collaborative and flex offices. Often practical, sometimes useful, these offices of a new kind are called revolutionary by some, alienating by others. This debate, however, conceals the fact that these offices are only a tool, and that if this tool evolves it is because aspirations change, and Work is reshaped. Choosing your office on the catalogue is therefore as coherent as a doctor handing a prescription without diagnostic. 

The proliferation of fads and ephemeral trends made us forget that the sense precedes the tool and that an office does not create any experience without the men and women using it. In a time when we rather endeavor to build rational UX systems, we usually forget to create an emotion before calibrating a format. If you are looking for meaning in the project you lead and the places you inhabit, prefer the feeling to the use.