But it is likely that knowledge workers can ill afford any degree of environmental lobotomy. We don t think about how to make our neurons and synapses fire a certain way when picking up a pencil. Neither do we exert any conscious effort, or follow a specific thought process, to exist in our physical environment. From paper clips to computers, plants to people, the office is one collective living entity. There is a relationship between man and his created environment, yet we re na ve about the environmentally dead nature of the things that are created.
Objects die when they no longer grow, evolve, or change in correlation with our lives.
Environments, not unlike objects, cease to live when treated as containers that are somehow separate or unrelated to the people and objects within them. This singular and separatist view offers no insight into the relationships between, and effects of, all the elements as a whole. Yet, we continue to live in our own self-imposed spaces, believing this image and perspective of the environment to be the correct and only one that exists. There is an inherent conflict in an environment of separateness because we concern ourselves only with the physicality of things in space, rather than the relationships between the two. Doreen Massey of the Open University suggests that we think of places as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, rather than bounded areas.