“4 CHAPTER 5

0 Accommodation to long-term industry change
' Ergonomics and health

0 Productivity and creativity

0 Diversity within community

0 Organization of continual change

Critical performance criteria for the project: Related to these general
goals was a set of performance criteria that was used both to generate the ini-
tial design concept as well as assess the degree to which plans met the intended
goals as they progressed in the design and implementation process. In the minds
of those who were going to use the newsroom, it was critical that its planning
and design create and support the following conditions.

0 Health and safety

0 Reduced stress

C Focus on creativity

0 Better work product

0 Celebration of craft

0 Human place to live

- Aesthetics and fun

0 Individuality and teamwork

0 Human contact and synergy

0 Environment of change and learning

The E-B-Researched Newsroom Design

The newsroom’s design responded to the data collected and to the demands of
the scale of the newsroom: a single space for 325 people.

0 Research-based urban design concept. Such a large space required a
major organizing principle to serve not only as a focal point for the design
process, but more importantly to provide a naturally mapped environment
around which the many users can easily develop their own cognitive maps. In
the newsroom, an “urban” analogy emerged as the major research-based plan-
ning concept.

After identifying that a major problem newsroom employees faced was
disorientation in the large 5 0,000-square-foot space, the design team decided to
organize the entire newsroom as a city—with boulevards, streets, neighbor-
hoods, front porches, parks, coffee shops, newsstands, and alleys. Cities gener-
ally have a natural and understandable organization—either organic, developed
over time like European cities, or grid-structured, like Midwestern American
cities. In either case, it is the major features of cities—town halls, squares,
rivers, parks, and so on—that provide orientation cues for everyone. The
research findings of planner Kevin Lynch (described in Chapter 4) provided an
inspiration for the newsroom design. The organizing plan centered on Lynch’s
five urban elements: landmarks, pathways, nodes, districts, and edges.

0 Landmarks. The E-B design team implemented several landmarks in the
newsroom city There is a “forum” as in ancient Rome where the wise citizens met