Is Colocation Still Relevant to Agile?

As 2020 has undoubtedly been the watershed year for remote work, I've been thinking a lot lately about colocation and its relevance to Agile.

When the principles of the Agile Manifesto were written in 2001, the authors believed in the importance of colocation:

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

I was curious to know what Agile thought-leaders were making of the remote work phenomenon these days, and if the idea of colocation was still imperative to them.

Martin Fowler, one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, makes the point that although face-to-face communication is more effective, a more important concern is to hire the best people you can and figure out how to make their collaboration more efficient later:

The first value of the agile manifesto is “Individuals and Interactions over Process and Tools”, which we should read as encouraging us to prioritize getting the best people we can on the team and helping them work well together. While we recognize face-to-face communication is more effective, that recognition cannot act to override the importance of individuals and interactions.

The fact that you can get a better team by supporting a remote working pattern has become increasingly important during my time in the software business and I expect its importance to keep growing.

It's interesting to think about this topic in the "necessity is the mother of invention" vein. When we all presupposed that a daily commute to the same physical building with your coworkers was the normal thing to do, we had best practices that presupposed that requirement.

In the current climate, we're all presupposing that work will carry on as normal with no one commuting anywhere and all communication being digital. What best practices will emerge in this world? Will the primacy of hiring good people quickly obliterate the former primacy of physical proximity in these conditions, with the world quickly moving on?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2020: The Watershed Year for Remote Work

As someone who's been advocating for remote work for almost a decade and working fully remote himself for half that time, I never could have guessed that the tide would turn so dramatically within the span of a few months. Due to a once-in-a-century pandemic, we're suddenly inside the greatest experiment in the history of...well...work.

When I was writing my to-this-day most popular blog post ever--But Where Do People Work in This Office?--back in 2015, Facebook was in the midst of building the world's largest open-plan office. Mark Zuckerberg had a dream of "the perfect engineering space: one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough to collaborate together."

And in May of this year, Facebook in an about-face announced that it will let many employees work from home permanently. Zuckerberg is quoted as saying, "We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale."

Twitter, another open-plan bandwagon company I highlighted in my aforementioned post, also announced in May their employees are now encouraged to work remotely permanently if they please.

The CEO of Shopify said about his company's COVID-initiated transition to permanent remote work, "We choose to jump in the driver’s seat, instead of being passengers to the changes ahead. We cannot go back to the way things were. This isn’t a choice; this is the future."

With all the horror of 2020, I'm hoping we can at least look back on this year as a landmark of the Information Age when the world finally woke up to the liberating force of remote work.

The private office is dead, long live the private office!

As someone who has been a vocal critic of open plan offices over the last several years, while also gleefully taking in the rise of remote work, I'm starting to wonder if it's time to give up the fight.

I find the sister phenomenon of the coworking space illuminating. An intentional open plan community for those fortunate souls privileged enough to look the quiet and privacy of a home office dead in the eye, turn their back, and instead pay a monthly fee for its near opposite.

It's almost like the open plan and the home office represent the yin-yang of working environments.

Companies with large distributed workforces often have hot-desking arrangements in their facilities with a pleasing symmetry of a progressive work-from-home policy.

I may be giving up on the idea of employers going back to the days of private offices, and calling the whole discussion moot. Really, what are we more likely to see in the future: more companies building out private offices for their employees, or more companies unleashing their employees upon their own home offices? The answer is so obvious, that I'm not sure it's worth typing.

The private office is dead. Long live the private (home) office!

Humane Offices: The HN List (April 2018)

An Ask HN post hit the front page of Hacker News this month asking people to submit information about companies that specifically do not use open plan offices. I decided to comb through the comments and produce a clean listing of just the company names, with links to their websites, and, where applicable, the specific office location mentioned.

• Viasat
• Apple (One Infinite Loop)
• Microsoft (Most of Redmond)
• Skyscanner (London)
• Pixar
• Fog Creek
• Trello
• CMG
• Stack Exchange
• ExtraHop
• Epic
• MITRE
• NetApp (Sunnyvale)
• Cisco (Norway)
• IBM Research
• FastMail
• Red Hat (Westford, MA)
• Kensho
• SAS
• PARC

Different Strokes for (Remote) Folks

There was a recent article on the popular topic of remote work that made the rounds and generated a lot of discussion.

I cannot trust employers to provide me with an adequate work environment, and this holds me back from doing the best possible work for them.

…

In the case of working from home/remote work, some employees do not do their best work from home, or simply don’t like it. That is fine—but you should trust your employees and treat them like adults. Let them make the call for themselves.

- Yan Lhert

There’s nothing that engenders respect within me for a company more than when they give me autonomy over my own working conditions. And I, like most people, give the greatest effort to a company I respect. A vibe of “We trust that you know what’s best for yourself” is extremely motivating.

It’s so interesting reading through the comments on Hacker News when articles about remote work come around. I could summarize most of the back-and-forth like so:

Person A: I work best like [this], and I think it’s ridiculous you like to work like [that].

Person B: Well, I work best like [that], and I think it’s ridiculous you like to work like [this].

Jeez! It’s almost like we’re all adults who have strong preferences for the way we like to work.

The solution to this conundrum begins and ends with Autonomy.

Here are some old sayings that capture the sentiment:

• To each their own.
• Whatever floats your boat.
• Live and let live.

One Workplace Design to Rule Them All is doomed.

I’m a believer in hybrid workplaces. The company has an office (or offices), but no one is forced to work in the office every day on a compulsory basis. And the office itself is a hybrid: sections are open plan for the people who prefer that environment, and there are quiet sections with a partitioned “cube farm” or small private rooms. Choose your own adventure.

There are two caveats I feel I must mention.

1. The employer must actually care about having high-performing employees. There are plenty of “body shops” out there who don’t necessarily care about this, and likely can’t differentiate high performers anyway.
2. Employees must understand the common theme throughout the working world that the highest performers get the most latitude. It’s up to the individual to take that autonomy with good grace, and kick so much ass that no one would dream of messing up your flow.

Different strokes for different folks.

What Does a Tech Company Look Like?

Many software shops are desperate to mirror the popular notion of how these places operate: loud, boisterous bullpen type arrangements, whiteboards all over with various contrived things on them, street lights flashing the current iteration progress, desks littered with crazy toys and blimps and toy guns, and various nerdly hijinx. It is, in every way, cargo culting, putting the image of how it should work against the actual of how it works.

It looks like what many outsiders think a software shop should look like, all those geniuses doing their genius thing.

Impress investors. Impress potential hires. To the latter most will say "oh no! That wouldn't impress me", but the truth is that real work in this field occurs in the most boring looking way possible, so we all like to imagine that a vibrant office will be an amazing new experience. But in the end we're still wrangling code all day.

- Commentor corresation on Hacker News

Steve McConnell wrote in 2000 about “cargo cult software engineering”—the idea that software organizations often copy superficial aspects of other organizations they admire, wrongly believing that they are the cause of the company’s success.

Here’s a startup that works out of a garage because it’s too broke to afford an office:

Right now, somewhere in downtown San Francisco, a large tech company is designing its swanky new office space:

 

I guess some never leave the garage.

Humane Offices: MathWorks

MathWorks is a name that keeps popping up here and there when I read discussions about tech companies that respect the need for quiet and privacy amongst their software developers.

With headquarters near Boston, MathWorks is the maker of the venerable mathematical computing products MATLAB and Simulink.

I was tipped off to MathWorks when someone left a comment on my post, But Where Do People Work in This Office?:

Here at MathWorks everyone gets their own offices with walls and doors and a small desk and chair for people visiting your office! I love it, it’s very peaceful to work.

Employees mention the private offices in reviews on Glassdoor:

Private offices: collaborate with a co-worker on the whiteboard/computer without interruptions.

- Current Employee - Software Engineer in Natick, MA

Private offices, great tools, many talented colleagues, plenty of opportunities to learn new skills.

- Current Employee - Principal Software Engineer in Natick, MA

From a comment thread on Hacker News about private offices for programmers, MathWorks comes up again:

…the general goal is an office for every full time salaried (non-hourly) employee.

In a thread from the /r/cscareerquestions subreddit:

"MathWorks...[is]/[was] famous for providing private offices to workers."

Check out the open positions at MathWorks here.

Humane Offices: SAS

Located outside Raleigh, North Carolina, analytics software maker SAS is the largest privately owned software company in the world.





SAS is consistently ranked as one of the best places to work in the United States and is well known for its workplace culture and world-class employee benefits. One particular aspect of its culture might stand out to readers of this blog.

One example of employee-centeredness can be found in the fact that each employee has his or her own office. There are no cubicles. While SAS Institute describes this as a way to maximize productivity, it also fits in with the operating principle for [CEO] Jim Goodnight: that’s how he would like it were he “just” an employee.  - The Wharton Work/Life Roundtable

Everyone gets a private office. We're not talking cube farm here, either. These are real offices with doors that can be shut. All of SAS' 13,700 employees are encouraged to be creative and make their work space fun. A SAS senior communication specialist has turned her office into a shrine to Elvis with a velvet Elvis painting and a life-size standup of the King.  - The Huffington Post

SAS has incredibly low employee turnover of 3-5% annually, when the software industry average is 20-25%. If you want to get in the door (and get your own door), apply here.

Humane Offices: Epic Systems

If you’re the kind of person who cares about humane office space, you’ve no doubt heard the vocal opinions of Joel Spolsky and his companies Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow. But I wanted to shine a light on some of the companies that aren’t constantly mentioned when the topic comes up.

Epic Systems, a healthcare software provider, has bucked the open plan trend by giving a private office to every developer in their beautiful campus outside Madison, Wisconsin.

 

At its 385-acre campus, with 1.5 million square feet of space spread across five buildings, Epic Systems Corp. provides private offices for all staff—a choice that is designed to support the focused-work practices and needs of software developers. According to Epic’s own research, this design approach increases productivity by 40 percent.

- HQ

One feature that isn't farm related: A lack of open offices. Cuningham has worked with Epic for more than 19 years, and learned early on that "employees felt they were much more efficient when working in individual offices."

"At first they exclaim that they don’t feel individual offices are necessary. But they all go away saying, ‘Wow, I think they’re onto something.'"

- Fast Company

 

Even more beautiful than the architecture and carefully manicured landscape is this: hallways lined with individual offices and doors that close.

 

Epic Systems is hiring aggressively. If you like what you see, apply here.

Open Plan Alternatives: Gleaming the Cube

In my last post, I urged office planners to ask their people what kind of environment is best for them. One surprising thing they might hear is that people prefer—gasp!—cubicles. Yes, cubicles.

In the hundreds of comments people have written on my various blog posts about office design, a common theme was of people working in open plans who wished they could have their cubicle back.

In fact, I was surprised when an interview I did with Wired regarding my views on office design was boiled down to a statement I made to this regard:

I’ve heard from several people who were incredulous that anyone could prefer a cubicle to an open plan. I believe this attitude may be a kind of extreme reaction to the giant, soulless “cube farm” that some companies employed (and still employ).

But, an open plan can turn into a landscape just as depressing when applied uniformly to a large space.

We can compromise, right? The Library and the Bazaar can coexist. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. And please don’t assume that everyone hates cubicles. It’s no private office, but for many people it beats the hell out of the open plan.

Open Plan Alternatives: Ask Your People

I’ve heard from several people who have the power to make decisions about office space, but feel frustrated that they can’t find practical suggestions on what to do instead of an open plan.

Well, if you’re already open to the idea that open plan offices are not a panacea, but you don’t know what to do instead, here’s a surprisingly straight-forward suggestion: ask the people who work there.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my writings on office design, it’s that people who work in offices have strong opinions about how they’re designed. The only thing that holds them back from expressing their opinions is a sense of learned helplessness that comes from years and years of working in crappy offices and seeing that no one cares about improving the situation.

This point was buried in another post I wrote regarding open plans, but here it is again: No size fits all. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to consider the people who work for you as individuals with different wants and needs, because, well, they are.

I’ll end on a quote from Peopleware, as I often do…

A common element that runs through all the patterns (both ours and Alexander’s) is reliance upon non-replicable formulas. No two people have to have exactly the same work space. … The texture and shape and organization of space are fascinating issues to the people who occupy that space. The space needs to be isomorphic to the work that goes on there. And people at all levels need to leave their mark on the workplace.

The Library and the Bazaar

In Christopher Alexander’s discussion of his Workspace Enclosure pattern, he mentions this interesting concept:

You should not be able to hear noises very different from the kind of noise you make, from your workplace. (Your workplace should be sufficiently enclosed to cut out noises which are of a different kind from the ones you make. There is some evidence that one can concentrate on a task better if people around him are doing the same thing, not something else.)

This is an idea that seems simple, perhaps common sense, but as I’ve come to realize through my investigations into office design, common sense is not so common.

Here’s a paraphrasing of the idea, as simply as I can state it:

Put things that sound similar together, and isolate them from things that sound different.

This idea (should) affect every aspect of office layout.

Here are some examples:

• Don’t put people who talk on the phone often within earshot of people who don’t. Put the “phone people” together, away from the non-phone people.
• Don’t put a copy machine and/or printer within earshot of desks. Machines and people make different sounds.
• Team rooms: people who work day in and day out on a certain project should be sound-isolated from those who don’t. Overhearing someone’s conversation is a lot less annoying if it’s highly relevant to you.
• Group non-work things together and sound-isolate them from work things. It’s cool if the microwave and the air hockey table can hear each other, but put a wall between them and any desk.

Nope	Yep

There’s a fantastic white paper written by the GSA called Sound Matters, which is free and a quick read. Within, they explain the concept of the Library and the Bazaar:

The contrasting needs of the modern workplace can be seen as “The Bazaar” and “The Library,” with different acoustic needs and responses appropriate for each.

“The Library” is an analogy for a workplace environment where both quiet and speech privacy are expected to optimize the ability to concentrate.

“The Bazaar” is an analogy for the expectation that the area is not private, where sharing is the norm… Noise is far more acceptable to workers in the bazaar and a high level of intermittent background noise is expected.

The workplace needs libraries and bazaars, with sufficient noise isolation between them. The problem with many trendy open-plan offices is how they place everyone’s workspace into a bazaar.

In staged glamour shots like this, no one has to work at these desks.

There’s a certain fantasy promoted by open plan enthusiasts about how surrounding your people with a sea of random conversations and noises all day will lead to serendipitous collaboration / synergy / magic. What I’d suggest is that the bazaar is the place for these conversations, not the library.

Even if you don’t believe in a private office for every individual, don’t force everyone into a bazaar.

Are Software Developers Respected by “Business People”?

In the Hacker News thread for my last blog post, there were a couple of comments that really got me thinking about the role respect plays in bad office design.

Is it time to get depressed yet? This has been a topic for such a long time. It was in Peopleware in 1987. I thought I discovered the topic when Joel (On Software) wrote about it in 2000. While a few people seem to enjoy open offices, the overwhelming majority of developers I know, or who chime in on HN, value a quiet place to work and dislike open offices.

And yet, not only has nothing changed, it seems to be getting worse. It couldn't be more clear to me that developers, at least on this issue, simply have no clout as a profession. There may be a few individuals who can make demands, but on the balance, these are decisions imposed on us, as a group, and we are apparently unable to do anything about it.

-- geebee

In a response to the above comment:

30 years ago programmers were highly respected. We were mysterious to others and we were able to influence things like office layouts and the like.

…

At some point over that time period, things shifted. Programmers became seen as "geeks" who didn't really understand business and "business guys" took over.

…

They have no concept that we might know what we're talking about because "office space is the realm of business."

…

We're not capable of decision making and we have no understanding beyond our weird obsession with those stupid computers. -- that's how they see us. They'll lie and say otherwise, but deep down and a fundamental level, that's how non-technical people see us.

-- MCRed

Is this true? Are software developers “geeks” that lack clout and respect with the “business people”?

If so, why is that? Have we earned our lack of clout/respect? I have some thoughts on this that I’ll explore in a future post.

In the meantime, let me leave you with this question: If you believed that an employee of yours did extraordinarily challenging mental work, which required extreme concentration, would you put them here to do that work?

Just Wear Headphones

In the comments people have written in response to my posts about open plan offices, a common theme was that of headphones (or earbuds) and how they are oversold as a solution to office noise.

In this post, I want to elaborate on a few issues with headphone use that hold them back from being a silver bullet.

Physical Hearing Damage

There are permanent physical consequences from prolonged headphone use. The effects accrue gradually, and as such people don’t notice that it’s happening.

From the American Osteopathic Association, Dr. James Foy explains:

I stress to my patients and the parents of my patients that if you can’t hear anything going on around you when listening to headphones, the decibel level is too high.

As a rule of thumb, you should only use [personal audio] devices at levels up to 60% of maximum volume for a total of 60 minutes a day. The louder the volume, the shorter your duration should be. At maximum volume, you should listen for only about five minutes a day.

ENT physician, Dr. Michael Seidman, continues in an article from the New York Times:

If you listen to music with earbuds or headphones at levels that block out normal discourse, you are in effect dealing lethal blows to the hair cells in your ears.

When you’re working in an environment so noisy that you have to pump music (or white noise) into your ear canal so loudly that it blocks out the other noise, you are doing permanent damage to your hearing.

Music Is Distracting

This is one of the trickier issues to discuss, as people love music and have a hard time separating the pleasure they get from listening to music from their effectiveness while listening to music.

If you ask software developers about what they blast out of those ubiquitous headphones, you’ll get answers like this:

"It's not just something in the background to help me concentrate; it's a source of inspiration, a door to free my mind from our day-to-day routines, and, at the same time, it's a way to memorize an experience," says Ortali. "I play tracks in a loop, sometimes the exact same track all day long. It's a way to connect with the lyrics, and move the tempo beneath my skin."

Scientific minds get very un-scientific when it comes to their favorite music.

In a terrific article from The Atlantic, “How Headphones Changed the World”:

In survey after survey, we report with confidence that music makes us happier, better at concentrating, and more productive.

Science says we're full of it. Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song -- loud or soft -- reduces overall performance for both extraverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music with lyrics to lower scores on concentration tests for college students, and other research have shown music with words scrambles our brains' verbal-processing skills. "As silence had the best overall performance it would still be advisable that people work in silence," one report dryly concluded.

If headphones are so bad for productivity, why do so many people at work have headphones?

That brings us to a psychological answer: There is evidence that music relaxes our muscles, improves our mood, and can even moderately reduce blood pressure, heart rate, and anxiety. What music steals in acute concentration, it returns to us in the form of good vibes.

Headphones give us absolute control over our audio-environment, allowing us to privatize our public spaces.

People conflate the positive psychological effects of creating a cocoon of their favorite sounds in an environment of noise they can’t control with positive effects on their productivity.

Feeling of Vulnerability

As I touched on in a previous post, seating people with their backs to a high-traffic area leads to a constant sense of unease and vulnerability.

People in this position have lost their sense of sight to detect when someone is approaching them. When you add headphones to the equation, they’ve now also lost their sense of hearing.

Headphone use in a noisy open plan environment can be a catch-22. The noise is so oppressive that you want to block it out, but then you have to deal with the feeling of vulnerability and frequent startles of people approaching you from behind without hearing them.

So What to Do?

Headphones are not the new walls. Give people a quiet place to work or let them work from their own.

 

Side Note: Noise-Cancelling Headphones

I want to quickly address “noise-cancelling” headphones in particular, as they are mentioned often as a quick fix for the problem of office noise. The technology at use was designed to cancel the low, constant rumble of aircraft engines. So while it may work to cancel the noise of your office air conditioner, it’s powerless against the voices of your co-workers (the real noise you’d want to cancel in an office environment). Read some of the reviews for the popular Bose QuietComfort noise-cancelling headphones, and you’ll get the picture.

The "Phone Room"

Here’s another office design 101 thing that I want to get out of the way: the importance of temporary private space for people stuck in open plans.

These private spaces sometimes get labeled as “phone rooms” or something similar, implying that they exist for a person to take their loud conversation away from the rest of the workers. Well, the exact opposite situation is at least as important if not more: for a person to get some quiet away from the loudness of the general office environment.

We already know that some people need more quiet time than others. And headphones are not a substitute for quiet.

Let’s stop calling these “phone rooms” and ensure there is no judgment from anyone who matters about people using these rooms simply for quiet time.

How to Make Your Open Plan Office Suck Less

Open plan offices suck, but there are some easy ways to make them suck less. Here are three ways that simple desk positioning can make a big difference in the suckiness of your open plan.

1. Lower Density

Lower density means less noise. Put more space between desks.  

Sucks:

Sucks less:

2. Face Space

Don’t seat people where their line of sight goes through a nearby face. If you haven’t felt the awkward tension of having someone’s visible face right behind your monitor while working all day, then congrats, your open plan sucks a bit less.

Sucks:

Sucks:

Sucks less:

3. Watch Your Back

Don’t seat people with their back to a high-traffic area. People in this position feel constantly vulnerable and cannot have one moment of screen privacy. Ask these folks to wear headphones, and they’ll feel even more vulnerable.

Sucks:

Sucks less:

 

If you’re committed to an open plan office (shame on you), then at least get these things right.

What Would Christopher Alexander Think of Remote Work?

I was intrigued by a comment someone from Hacker News wrote in response to my post about office plans:

People tend to enjoy private alcoves with a view on the action, which is kinda best of both worlds. Christopher Alexander describes that pattern in _A Pattern Language_.

I felt an immediate connection between this idea and the feeling I get when working remotely. I think this "private alcove with a view of the action" applies in a non-physical sense as well. I wanted to see if I could make a more direct connection with Christopher Alexander's writing, and track down this pattern the HN commenter mentioned in the literature, and see if it jibed with remote work.

A Pattern Language

I bought a copy of Christopher Alexander's classic architecture book, A Pattern Language, and started hunting. And then...since the physical book ended up being ~1,200 pages in a format resembling an English dictionary in dimensions and typeface, I quickly found a nice, searchable electronic copy at the Internet Archive.

Alexander mentions workplace design in several of his patterns, and alcoves are sort of an ongoing theme throughout the book, but he never really ties them together in a way that captures the feeling I mentioned above. In fact, one of the interesting things I learned reading through dozens of patterns in the book, is that it's clearly a book that was conceived and written before remote work as we know it today was even on the horizon. In one section, he speaks of how Xerox and IBM typewriters have played a vital role in how he and his co-authors produced the book. This is an age before the Internet, when remote work meant having a personal typewriter in your home.

It's frustrating to think about how the accumulated knowledge about human work activity pre-Internet is so tied to physical constraints and the built environment. A great deal of a masterpiece like A Pattern Language seems out of place, for example, when you can no longer take for granted that a company must have a central office where people gather to work together. Many of the foundational assumptions of a work published in 1977 would not exist in a work published in 2015.

The modern concept of remote work / telecommuting is so new, that the masterpieces that will describe this new world have not been conceived yet. Christopher Alexander is still alive, at 78 years old, but I couldn't find anything online about his views on modern remote work. I'm dying to know what he'd have to say about people working 100% remote for companies like 37signals Basecamp or Automattic.

So I didn’t find anything in A Pattern Language that seemed analogous to the modern remote work experience, but let me take another stab at it…

Evolutionary Aesthetics

Below is a landscape that people universally find pleasing to the eye. Why?

Several years ago I learned about the field of evolutionary aesthetics, which provides some fascinating insight into people’s preferences for certain landscapes over others. Here’s a quote from The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies in a section on evolutionarily driven landscape preference:

A landscape form that affords somewhere to hide and look out from is the kind of landscape in which we feel safe.

How do you feel about the workspace pictured below? Quite a view!

And here’s a picture of someone’s home office setup. Not quite the same view.

But, in a team that has a lively remote work culture, this setup can feel very similar to that wonderful city view. This is where you go to view the human activity of your team. To me it feels like I'm in a "private alcove with a view of the action."

Going back to A Pattern Language for a moment, in the pattern called "Hierarchy of Open Space", Alexander says this:

Outdoors, people always try to find a spot where they can have their backs protected, looking out toward some larger opening, beyond the space immediately in front of them.
...
Simple as this observation is, there is almost no more basic statement to make about the way people place themselves in space. And this observation has enormous implications for the spaces in which people can feel comfortable. Essentially, it means that any place where people can feel comfortable has: 1) A back. 2) A view into a larger space.

I think remote work has psychological parallels to pleasing physical space. I know this is sort of a weird connection, but I feel like there's something there. If you've ever worked remote on a team of people that were also remote, maybe you'll know what I'm talking about. I think a person in their home office, working in a lively remote culture has the psychological equivalent of their back protected with a view into a larger space.

Am I crazy? What would Christopher Alexander think?