ABSTRACT
The health and safety of the worker must be the primary consideration in creating a better physical working environment for working people. Many workplaces have reached the point where they are not just safe but are attractive as well. A very few have gone further and are now beyond simply providing for the natural desire to work in pleasant surroundings and are using terms like "democratic", "user-oriented", and "participative design" to describe what they are doing. This chapter provides three detailed examples of the most progressive edge of workplace design. Two are offices and one is a factory. They are, respectively, a hot-shot company in the fast-food business, an out-of-the-way corner of government, and a small European multinational corporation. In each case, the people in charge have given up old authoritarian ideas for new democratic ones and have either found or are expecting to find that their operations improve as a result.
