Personalization of Space in Office Environments

ABSTRACT: In today’s world, offices play an important role in human’s life because many people spend most of their time there. Office layout concepts were changed during years according to some factors such as “human needs”, “organizational needs” and also “technology”. Across the history of workplace, it changed from traditional closed office to open-plan cubicles offices. All types of offices need to support user’s physical and psychological needs. An important issue that should be considered in office design is personalization of space that is linked to concepts of privacy, territorial behaviors and personal space. Personalization of space refers to the purposeful ornamentation, decoration, modification, or rearrangement of an environment by its users to reflect their individual identities. In the workplace most employees need to personalize their spaces to identify their own space. Personalization of workspace serves many purposes such as preventing stress resulted from work and it helps to enhance satisfaction with the work environment and the job, expressing self-identity and perhaps even well-being of employers, all these shows the importance of this term. This study focuses on reasons of personalizing of space for employees and affects of it on the organization of the interior space of the work environments and well-being of users. For this purpose all concepts which are linked to personalization such as territory, proxemics, privacy, and personal space are described and finally the personalization and affect of it on user and space are explained. The aim of this study is to expose the manners of personalization in work environments which help designers to create more suitable interior spaces in offices for employees according to their physical and psychological needs. The study also aims to find out whether personalization have the same meaning for different people, whether the reasons of personalization changes according to the gender or not, whether females personalize their space in different manners than males do, do they believe on affect of personalization on well-being or not and at the end whether they arrange their space to control interactions and communication or not. For these purpose a case study has been done in this study to find the answers of the above questions. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………