Interview: Larissa Murphy, Dare Design

• Features

• 15/10/2025

We spend a lot of time discussing what makes a workspace tick. Phrases like “tech-forward”, “user-friendly” and “intuitive” get thrown around so often they risk losing meaning. But what do these ideals actually mean in practice? More importantly, what truly makes a workspace work? To find out, we put the question to Larissa Murphy, vision creator at interior design firm Dare Design.

The answer, according to Murphy, is complicated yet straightforward: “The best workspaces work for one reason: they’re simple. But simplicity is impossibly difficult to achieve because we tend to over-design either intentionally or not.”

People make spaces work

At the end of the day, every organisation has the same ultimate goal: to generate profits. To achieve this, employees need to be productive, effective, and efficient in their work. And in order for people to perform at that level, the spaces around them must actively empower and support what they do. But this only happens when design reflects how people really behave, not how designers and tech professionals imagine they should.

With a longstanding interest in organisational psychology, Murphy has consistently advocated for design and technology professionals to bring human behaviour into the conversation right from the start. She illustrates: “Humans have natural behaviours, and we can drive workplace efficiency by leveraging these behaviours. Let’s take the example of garden landscaping at parks. There’s this nice meandering path through the park because from the designer’s perspective, this is the best way to take in the sights of the park. And then you see this muddy trail that cuts through the grass because realistically, that’s the fastest and most efficient way to get from point A to point B. As beautiful as the walk down the path may be, it’s not efficient or effective at supporting people in what they want. Most importantly, it’s a waste of money too.”

The same ‘muddy trail’ philosophy applies to workspaces too as Murphy observes: “We tend to design in a very convoluted way detached from our understanding of human behaviour because not enough of our design education in Singapore considers or educates from a psychology or behavioural science perspective. There’s the age-old debate in the design world of form versus function. But it’s not even about that anymore; it’s about human behaviour. You can provide the functionality, but if it is not aligned with the employee aptitude and needs then it fails.”

Returning to her point about the tendency to over design workspaces, Murphy acknowledges that it can ironically be a double-edged sword to solve the very problems it creates. She says: “Over designing can be a tool when it comes to how we approach a workspace, but it’s going to sound counterproductive at first. You consider every scenario and use case for the space, you place every kind of tech in the space in the pursuit of things that might look good or feel futuristic to the point where it becomes clear that it’s redundant. And so, when you look at the complexity of all that over-designing, the next process is stripping off the things that don’t actually serve a purpose to users. What do we not need now? Strip, cut, and we’ll eventually get to the base of what people actually need. Let people be what makes a space work.”

Murphy cautions that part of the problem also lies in how rigidly we hold on to predefined ideas of what an office should look like: “Putting individuals in the same rows of desks doesn’t work because they’re not all the same. You’re squeezing people of different personalities, roles, and habits into a box that doesn’t fit. We have this preconceived notion that this is what an office is supposed to be, and if it doesn’t look like that, then it must be wrong. That’s why we must first consider people, their behaviour, the nature of the work being undertaken, and the organisation itself. What are its objectives? Does it benefit more from people working in isolation, or from collaboration?”

Where is AV falling short?

Now, we’re not here to point fingers and play the blame game. But if the AV industry wants to truly serve the needs of end users and deliver successful projects from a holistic perspective, something has to change.

According to Murphy, it all starts with our people. Murphy points out an all too familiar problem during the consultation phase of a project: “Too often, designers work on the space first and only think about the technology later. AV and tech professionals, on the other hand, think that designers will always make space for them in the later stage of the project. But the truth is that AV rarely sits at the table together with us designers from the start. Often, the AV consultants we work with will wait for us to provide them with a layout or floorplan before they decide to step in. So many problems evolve just because we don’t see each other as equal partners working from the same starting point to the same completion point.”

She continues: “It’s a misconception that we need to design the space first before the technology can be layered on top. We are talking about what a user wants and needs in their workspace, and that experience can only be supported by technology integrated into the design. So, the conversation right from the beginning should already involve AV. As interior designers, we can provide the materiality of what you touch and the visual of what you see. But the technology needs to provide the connection for what users will eventually feel in their workspaces.”

As Murphy puts it, both end users and designers are not always going to be subject matter experts when it comes to technology, and that’s where the value of AV comes in. Murphy notes: “I love working on projects where our AV consultants sit in with us during the design consultation phase. You need to hear firsthand the type of people that work at the organisation you’re designing for and you need to understand the client’s aptitude for technology. What they can handle and what they can’t, what will be too complex for them and what will not be.”

Murphy concludes: “When clients say they want something ‘intuitive’ or ‘simple’, we’re all going to have different definitions of what those two words mean. This is why we need AV professionals in the room with us to really come up with an AV system that will hit the mark. If only one party is part of the conversation then half of the project will be lost in translation.”