There’s a moment in a good presentation when the speaker says something so obvious it feels like a revelation. Jill Alberico had several of those moments during her talk at the recent INDEAL Champion Conference at THE MART in Chicago.

The one that stuck with me most from the director of learning and workplace strategy at Global Furniture Group: Most of you are sitting at a work surface that is too high for you.

The industry standard height, 29.5 inches above the finished floor, was engineered for a person who is 6 feet tall. Alberico looked out at the room of dealers and designers and asked how many of them were 6 feet tall. A few hands went up, which means that virtually everyone else in that room, and in offices across the country, has spent their careers hunched slightly forward at a desk that was never sized for their body. We just accepted it. We didn’t know any better. Nobody asked.

That’s the through line of everything Alberico presented. Nobody asked.

Her topic was human-centered design. Human-centered design is a correction. It isn’t a trend or an aesthetic movement. It’s the industry finally admitting that decades of workplace design was done for square footage and headcount and cost per seat, and not for the people who had to show up and actually do the work.

“Workplaces don’t fail because they’re unattractive,” she said. “They fail because they aren’t designed around human behavior. They’re designed around aesthetics. They’re designed around furniture.”

The move from private offices to open plan to activity-based working were shifts sold as progress. What they actually were, she argued, was efficiency in different clothing. The human being in the workstation was an afterthought in all of them.

She organized the case around four pillars: physical wellbeing, cognitive performance, emotional needs and social connection. The industry has done a reasonable job on the physical side, or at least has tried with products like ergonomic chairs, sit-stand desks and adjustable monitors. But even there, the work surface height revelation suggests we’ve been solving for the wrong person.

The cognitive piece is where things get uncomfortable. Twenty-six minutes is how long it takes a worker to return to full concentration after a single interruption. In an open office with no acoustic separation, interruptions are common throughout the day. Alberico was direct about what that means. We’ve built environments that make sustained thought nearly impossible, and then wondered why people say they get more done at home.

“Speech intelligibility is people talking in the office,” she said. “It is more distracting than anything else.”

Look around any open office and you’ll see the evidence. People with headphones on, not listening to music, just trying to construct a private acoustic environment with whatever tools they have available. It’s an improvised workaround for a problem that was built into the space.

The emotional and social pillars tend to get less airtime in design conversations, but Alberico spent real time on both. Belonging matters. Access to daylight matters. Plants matter. What some consider amenities are really measurable drivers of whether people feel seen and whether they stay.

And the social piece, the part about needing each other, is important as well. COVID proved that we’re pack animals. We missed the people we complained about sitting next to. But returning to an office that was already broken before the pandemic, without changing anything about it is just a repetition of the same mistake.

“If it didn’t work for us prior, why would we want to go back to it now?” she asked.

She closed on post-occupancy evaluations, the practice of returning to a finished project months later to measure whether it’s actually working. Almost nobody in the room raised their hand when she asked how many of them did it regularly. “Design does not end when people move in,” she said.

That’s the whole argument, really. We finish the project, hand over the keys, and move on. The people we designed for are left to figure it out. Most of them adjust. They bring in their own lamp, they find the one quiet corner of the floor, they put their headphones on and tune everything out.

They make it work, even though no one ever asked them if it was working.