Japhet Koteen

His Work: Planning and Development (Coordinator)

“As long as the work is interesting” “it doesn’t really matter where I am.”

Japhet Koteen tells me “there’s a couple of elements to what it means to work in a place. The work is I think the biggest part of it and the location is another part, and then the physical space is a fairly minor component. So I don’t think about the design that much. I don’t like the commute.” He says “there’s the commute aspect which I think is the worst part of the job and then contrast with the motivation and rationale for doing what we’re doing—which is the best part. This is sort of one of the important pieces in making the world a better place” “and doing it in a way that sort of acknowledges where we are now and moves us towards where we need to be in the future.” Mr. Koteen feels that the physical workspace isn’t all that important.

I ask him to tell me about his workspace and he explains that he used to sit in an open space between two book keeper’s who were constantly talking back and forth to each other so he put his headphones on. He tells me “So this is a huge improvement. It has a window which I like. I got a couple of construction projects that I can watch. You get to see how the whole process goes up.” Though Mr. Koteen doesn’t have many attachments to the design features he does tells me “I think having natural light is one of the few design features that I think is really really critical.”

 Japhet Koteen shares his workspace with a fellow employee and I ask what that’s like. He tells me “she is the person with whom I collaborate with most. She is the community building half of things and I’m the more physical development half of things, if we had strict job divisions like that but we don’t.” He explains “I think there’s definitely an advantage to having verbal communication with someone who you’re collaborating with.” “The whole point for sharing an office is to minimize communication costs so it makes it very easy for us to share ideas, share information, share documents and that’s the advantage.” They do a lot of events and networking with the community so being able to communicate quickly and easily helps.

I ask about his ideal workspace and he says that the location and commuting could be more convenient. He says “for me right now it’s pretty effective. There’s not a lot of things that I need that aren’t here.” “As long as the work is interesting” “it doesn’t really matter where I am.” I ask him what some of the things he needs, or what kinds of key things make working here effective and he replies “I think having a horizontal surface, having a place to pack up plans is useful. Having a decent computer helps, a fast internet connection is probably the most important thing. Having decent light and relative quiet that’s pretty much all I need.”  Mr. Koteen tells me that not having all the things he has at home helps too because there are less distractions. Japhet Koteen tells me that the best workspace “mostly depends on the coworkers.”

When I ask Mr. Koteen about his relationship with the community he tells me “the attitude we try to take is we just try to do the right thing every time. And the strategy is to create, promote, and implement these events which bring people together around a given place.” He tells me that one of the projects in which they bought a big parking garage the first thing they did was organize an event for the local community. They showed movies, had food vendors, a little beer garden and the people really enjoyed it. At another location, when the building was complete they left a large common area on the ground floor for the community to use free of charge. Japhet Koteen says “generally we are pretty tightly integrated with the communities in which we work.” He explains to me that the company is unique because they “approach it in a more holistic way.” Mr. Koteen says “we focus on building with the community first.” He explains to me that they are more interested in taking decaying places in a neighborhood and improving and transforming it into something better.

I ask Japhet Koteen to put his experience with his work into a few words. He replies “Adaptive. Land-Use Economics. Trust. Community. Recycling.” Nearing the end of our interview I ask Mr. Koteen if he has any other thoughts or feelings he would like to share about his workspace or his work and he tells me “I think about my work a lot more than I think about my workspace.”