The Importance Of Spaciousness Designed For The Living Experience.
With a special look at the remote working community lifestyle!
Recently I reflected back to the time when the Boothbay YMCA got a new swimming pool, causing the pool to be closed for about a year in the process. Before then I swam laps in the pool during the off-season when it is too cold to swim at Grimes Cove. Once the pool was open again, I found it such an unpleasant experience to negotiate the dressing rooms designed for people the size of thirteen-year-olds that I found myself dreading going to the pool.
Once there was a spacious dressing room filled with large private stalls where one could comfortably change. The larger space in which the changing stalls were located was quite social, serving a function needed in this town. People engaged in conversations in that wide-open space. The new changing rooms are tiny and there is no surrounding large space inviting social interactions. In approaching the changing rooms one walks by the location of the former dressing room facility which is now an open area with cafe tables and chairs that were always empty at the time of day that I walk by.
The new dressing rooms spoke a message, a rather strange one for a peninsula that is the grayest community in the USA. The message is that the YMCA is for the high school students, not for older folks. I wondered where the designer’s heads were at, that they didn’t design a pool facility, in consideration of those that use it, and in consideration of the community where it is located. Swimming is an exercise that invokes deep relaxation. The dressing room is a part of the whole experience. The new dressing rooms were like torture that one had to endure to get to the relaxing part of the experience.
So I decided to use the older dressing rooms in another section of the building. rather than the new changing facilities adjacent to the pool. The day I did so I had almost finished swimming my laps when my state of relaxation was interrupted by the lifeguard tapping me on the shoulder to tell me that the pool was closing in five minutes. That was the last straw. I never went back to the pool again.
The pool designers did not design the pool with the total experience of the user in mind. The lifeguard reflected the same attitude as if unaware that a swimmer is in a deep relaxation state and that tapping the swimmer on the shoulder to tell the swimmer that closing time is near is a rude and unnecessary awakening. The entire pool experience made me feel unwelcome. Life was better without it.
Now as I reflect on other new developments, already accomplished, such as the tiny roundabout a tree placed in the middle of the road, or developments being talked about, such as reducing land plot sizes and breaking former spacious homes up into smaller units, crowding the “workforce” of unidentified employers into tiny spaces, is a past-contemporary theme and a very ill-advised one. The proponents of crowding seem to believe that anything new is automatically better than anything old- not so!
Now the old order is changing as local developers are working in a paradigm from the present-past. Even at that, the paradigm that they visualize makes as much sense as thinking that Boothbay Harbor will become the new Manhatten! I am so tired of Maine economic development thinking that fails to recognize the values that are inherent in the Maine that is, or was, beginning in 1976, when central management was first instituted. Then Maine was leading the nation in the growth of small businesses that employed no more than 100 people.
Along comes Longley, who creates a board composed of the leaders of largest and wealthiest businesses in the state to “lead the Legislature” in reinventing Maine government as a centrally managed state, in other words, instead of a fertile ground for many small companies, one big public-private corporation will rule the state. One might say this is the source of the grid mentality that creates smaller and smaller spaces for the human experience! The new board exclusively composed of the heads of large businesses was there to save the day for small businesses. No small businesses at the table- so no direct understanding of, or input from, the user experience, if the users, in this case, are the small businesses.
So Maine. like many other states developed huge corporate welfare programs, which in essence exchange public capitalization of large private businesses for X number of “quality” jobs with “quality job” defined as jobs that pay higher than average wages and benefits, which likewise excludes the user experience, in that, according to such a definition, a person who hates every minute they are at their job but makes a higher than average income doing it has a better quality job that someone who is meaningfully engaged in their work but does not make as much money. The level of engagement in one’s work represents the user experience, which is not part of the equation because all the State is really interested in is trading public funds to capitalize a private company in exchange for a calculated amount of payroll tax intake. It’s all about the money and only about the money, which is why user experience does not enter into the paradigm.
That is the paradigm that has led since 1976, central management is deeply entrenched in Maine. The type of economic development thinking generated by Central management is ubiquitous and the same everywhere, as if economic development is a one size fits all program. Thus we have developers, who seem to be motivated by nothing more than making money during a real estate boom, justifying changing the ordinances to their advantage, with the abstract notion that the peninsula needs large workforce housing for the phantom business that will locate here if we provide large workforce housing.
This thinking is not relevant to either the peninsula, with or without its water supply issues, or to the new global paradigm challenging the old global paradigm. The peninsula is actually better suited to the emerging paradigm, that of remote workers, than that of the old public-private-corporate-state model.
I have deeply researched the corporate welfare model, especially as it relates to Maine. occasionally observing tension in the public-private state model over whom rules whom- does the state rule or does private industry rule? As with any symbiotic relationship, it comes with a price, for both sides, and so I believe there will be an element of freedom felt by both sides as the old model is challenged and transformed. The public-private government needs to get a divorce!
Boothbay should not be pursuing the corporate welfare workforce model. We are ideally suited to become a new community model for the remote working workforce. That is the new paradigm we need to create together and ask,” What does an ideal remote working community look like? “
An attractive feature of corporate culture is teamwork, and the individual teams working within the larger culture. This idea easily transposes into communities based on remote working culture, which is complementarily compatible with a community of designer-craftsmen-maker studios.
The drawback that is most referenced about remote working is the feeling of loneliness but loneliness only applies when one is not concentrating on actual work, much of which is best done alone, where there are no distractions to concentration.
When not within a concentrated focus, feedback and interaction are desirable. This can be encouraged by developing local teams. A remote worker is an independent contractor. The remote worker can develop a studio that incorporates teamwork, creating jobs for others. This gets back to the small business environment in which Maine was once leading the whole country. This also can relate and interact with the designer craftsmen network. Old tech and new tech interacting creatively in a natural environment, coined the Garden City, by post-industrial revolution visionaries. As is, the Boothbay peninsula is ideally suited to nurturing a remote work community in conjunction with a designer-makers community, with the exception of ordinances prohibitive to home business growth. This kind of “workforce housing” requires spaciousness and makes spaciousness more affordable to industrious talented grassroots entrepreneurs.
The BoothbayPeninsula is already an ideal place for supporting a creative and unique small entrepreneurial community. Such a community does not require radical urbanization of the community, which if Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor are working together, both town must acknowledge there is a limitation to sustainable growth in consideration of our water supplies. A remote working community combined with a designer-craftsmen community is also a teaching community with an attraction for young people who would like a chance to realize their own potential.
Read More HERE: The LifeStyle Approach To Economic Development Makes An Environmentally Sustainable Paradigm