A Savage Chickens cartoon about reserving your personal space – and a better alternative

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Savage Chickens cartoon from Doug Savage’s titled Now Taking Orders shows one method for reserving your intimate space - a personal moat. (See the Wikipedia article on Proxemics). But there is a better alternative.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, a large sombrero works as well as a personal moat, and you don’t need to add water or baby alligators. Back on October 22, 2014 I blogged about Sombreros and proxemics.

 

The image of a tourist came from Padaguan at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Sombreros and proxemics

Today’s F Minus cartoon by Tony Carrillo shows a man sitting on the bench seat of a bus while wearing a sombrero with a very broad brim. Adjacent passengers are moving away, and the caption amusingly but incorrectly claims that:

“It’s called a sombrero. I believe that is Spanish for ‘personal space’.”

It made me chuckle, since I haven’t written about proxemics in a long time. Back on September 9, 2009 I blogged about Closeness, proxemics, and graphics. In that post I noted that there were four spaces or distances:

Public space - greater than 12 feet
Social space - 4 to 12 feet
Personal space - 1.5 to 4 feet
Intimate space - less than 1.5 feet

Perhaps Tony should have said intimate space.

The sombrero image was derived from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

Closeness, proxemics, and graphics

In my last post I mentioned that Nick Morgan had discussed the significance of the following four types of spaces or distances:

Public space - greater than 12 feet
Social space - 4 to 12 feet
Personal space - 1.5 to 4 feet
Intimate space - less than 1.5 feet

I drew a figure with a series of concentric squares to illustrate the relative sizes of those spaces. Squares made more sense to me than circles, because rooms typically are rectangular.

At first I missed something in the definition for those spaces. When I looked further I found that they actually were like radiuses, not diameters. A practical person would expect diameters, which is how one measures and orders bolts or drill bits.

The technical term for talking about closeness is proxemics. Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist, came up with it to describe the study of distances between people as they interact. He died at age 95 in July. You can read his obituary here in the New York Times.

The figure shows a series of personal reaction bubbles as illustrated by WebHamster for the Wikipedia article on proxemics. A recent article about personal space by Alan Rapp discusses the concept further and also mentions a 1969 book by Robert Sommer, Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design.

The Wikipedia article has a more complicated description of those distances that divides each of them into near and far phases:

Public distance (used for public speaking)
Far phase – greater than 25 feet
Near phase – 12 to 25 feet

Social distance (for interactions among acquaintances)
Far phase – 7 to 12 feet
Near phase – 4 to 7 feet

Personal distance (for interactions among good friends or family members)
Far phase – 2.5 to 4 feet
Near phase – 1.5 to 2.5 feet

Intimate distance (for embracing, touching, or whispering)
Far phase – 0.5 to 1.5 feet
Near phase – less than 0.5 feet

I gave up on making a figure incorporating both the near and far phases, because it started to look almost like an archery target. You can see why Dr. Morgan avoided discussing the near and far phases.

Closeness and connecting with your audience

Yesterday I was mulling over the first of a series of blog posts by Nick Morgan on How do you connect with your audience?

He began by pointing out that there are four different zones or spaces between people. These are:

Public space- Greater than 12 feet

Social space- 4 to 12 feet

Personal space- 1.5 to 4 feet

Intimate space- less than 1.5 feet

The four spaces could have been described better by an illustration, so I used PowerPoint to create one.

He finished by stating the essential point that:

“Everything significant in communication between people happens in personal space or intimate space.”

When I looked at my illustration I began to wonder if the distinction between public space and social space might roughly correspond to Professor Andrew Abela’s distinction between conference room and boardroom presentation styles.

Last December I discussed both how Your presentation style should match both your intent and the size of your audience and how Audience size determines working distance and thus presentation style. We don’t have common terminology for describing either working distances or audience sizes, so there is much more that could be said about interactions, if we just could find the words.

For theater seating a person takes up a square with a 3-foot side, so an audience of 64 people would fit into the 24-foot side of the green square marked as social space. Does that audience size define the limit for a boardroom presentation? (I first assumed that 12 feet was the width, but it's the half-width,or radius).