My Desk is my Castle

Exploring personalization cultures

Led by the Köln International School of Design, this research project aims to explore the socio-cultural and gender aspects that workplace appropriation represents. Data in the form of photographs and interviews was gathered from across 11 countries and later put into this publication by publisher Birkhäuser.

The subject matter

Offices are spaces that move between the public and the private. When visiting someone’s office, we instantly get the feeling of having entered a private domain. This happens because of various strategies of appropriation and individualization of workplaces.

My Desk is my Castle explores the multiple dimensions of privatization of desks. Through observation and analysis, this work offers valuable insights on cultural diversity, the differences between various business sectors and special characteristics based on gender-defined connotations.

The Barcelona team

The university where I was studying, BAU Design College of Barcelona (Spain), was one of the 11 institutions collaborating in this research project. The other teams, composed too by interdisciplinary design students, were located in New York (USA), Cologne (Germany), Milan (Italy), Curtitíba (Brazil), Cairo (Egypt), Pune (India), Taipei (Taiwan), Hong Kong (China), Fukuoka (Japan), and Auckland (New Zealand).

Our primary task was to gather data in the form of photographs from workspaces, face-to-face interviews with the owners of the respective desks, and through non-participant observation of the spaces. This input was later sorted and categorized into 8 clusters following the research guidelines of the project.

The shootings were organized and done in small teams in several offices in the city of Barcelona. The study focussed on 5 different business sectors (banking, insurance, administration, call centers, and design studios), aiming to discover and better understand the common aspects and differences between them when it comes to personalization culture.

The results

The 319 pages of the publication reflect the highly subjective-emotional aspects of desk appropriation, as „it marks the territory of its owners and informs us about their status, their private preferences and desires“. At the same time, some initial hypothesis were confirmed while some findings were unexpected.

The study around the nature of objects, their cultural and gender-related aspects, and the comparative analysis of the involved business sectors set a basis with rich insights to move „towards a more thoughtful and humane future of office design“.

Further information

You can find more information on My Desk is my Castle on the Birkhäuser site or read a preview of the book at issuu.

Uta Brandes & Michael Erlhoff (Eds.), Birkhäuser
2012