Designing for Energy, Not Just Activity

April 8, 2025 · Work/Shift Insights Issue #1

By Frederic Libet Descorne

We’ve become obsessed with activity.

Desks booked = success. Meeting rooms full = collaboration. A heatmap glowing red = “look how alive the space is!”

But here’s the problem: activity doesn’t mean productivity. And it definitely doesn’t mean people are thriving.

If anything, we’ve been designing workplaces that burn energy, not build it.

We’ve mistaken motion for momentum. Busyness for impact. Presence for performance.

And in the process, we’re draining people.

Energy is the real metric.

Think about it: no one does great work when they’re depleted. No one feels creative when they’re overstimulated. No one feels connected in a space that’s constantly loud, flatly lit, and visually chaotic.

As organisational psychologist Dr. Sharon Grossman puts it: “Burnout isn’t caused by doing too much, it’s caused by doing too much without enough recovery.”

And recovery is environmental. It’s spatial. It’s designable.

Energy-aware design looks different.

It’s not about ping-pong tables and smoothie bars. It’s about understanding how the human brain actually works and shaping space to match.

Natural rhythm matters. We’re wired to work in cycles. Peaks of focus. Dips of fatigue. But most offices ignore that. Fluorescent lighting, flat schedules, and zero variety force people into a static loop.

Enter: Lendlease’s Barangaroo HQ in Sydney. They used circadian lighting that mirrors natural daylight, shifting in warmth and brightness throughout the day. The result? Employees reported better focus, fewer afternoon crashes, and improved sleep. Design, doing its job, quietly.

Focus requires boundaries.

Everyone wants “collaboration,” but too often that just means everyone’s talking all the time.

There’s a reason Google’s Zurich campus includes deep-focus pods, sound-absorbing materials, and “cognitive quiet zones.” It’s not just quirky design, it’s backed by neuroscience.

The average knowledge worker switches tasks every 3 minutes. Every switch burns energy. Multiply that by 8 hours and tell me the open plan is working.

In fact, studies show that cognitive performance drops by up to 15% after just 20 minutes of exposure to persistent background noise. And yet we continue to build environments that overstimulate rather than support focus.

I once worked with a team who had moved into a gleaming, open-concept “activity-based working” environment. Everyone was mobile, everything was shared, and on paper, it looked great. But within a month, I was hearing the same feedback: “I’m exhausted by lunchtime.” We hadn’t given them anywhere to land, focus, or decompress. It was a high-activity space, but a low-energy experience. We learned quickly.

Emotion is energy, too.

Ever walked into a space and felt instantly agitated? Or oddly calm?

That’s not a vibe. That’s emotional bandwidth being taxed or restored by your environment. Design impacts that. Whether we acknowledge it or not.

Recovery space isn’t weakness, it’s strategy. Sometimes, fuelling energy looks like giving people a place to not be “on.”

The smartest workplaces? They create variety with intent. They don’t guess. They listen. They design for flexibility, but with boundaries. And they know that giving people permission to pause is actually what helps them sustain performance.

A simple design principle I come back to often: enable people to do their best work without needing to fight the environment. Application? That could mean placing solo focus pods in quieter zones of the floorplate, or locating informal lounge areas near natural light to signal permission to rest. Small decisions, big shifts.

So here’s the real question: if we’re serious about performance, why are we still designing as if people are machines?

Activity is easy to measure. Energy is harder. But it’s far more meaningful.

Because the most valuable spaces won’t just be the ones that look good on a booking dashboard. They’ll be the ones that leave people feeling more focused, more grounded, and more able to come back tomorrow.

Let’s stop designing for hyperactivity. Let’s start designing for human capacity.

And if you’re a strategist, designer, or leader, ask yourself this: How does the space you’re shaping give people energy, not just something to do?

That’s where the real impact starts.