Aesthetics play an important, although often under-theorized, role in the IC. The variables of space, color, temperature, and noise all contribute to efforts at an individual level. Standardizing these elements would be consistent with ICD 203 by removing a variable that might skew analysis. Aesthetics are also an important factor at the corporate level. They help organizations to cohere around a shared worldview and facilitate integration among components. Finally, aesthetics play an important role in how agencies effectively engage their partners in national security, engage with overseers, and enlist the confidence of the public. To ensure that IC agencies are learning from their own experiences and applying new developments in the realm of workspace design, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence should create two new offices. The first of these-a chief aesthetics officer-would assess whether the environments that agencies created aligned with those agencies' own missions and with the facilitation of a common IC-wide culture. The second office should consolidate the individual historical staffs and entities across the IC-for example, the Center for Cryptologic History at the NSA, the Center for the Study of Intelligence at the CIA, the FBI Experience resources-into an ODNI entity that could ensure that agencies not only devoted resources to preserving and mining their legacies, but also ensure that the knowledge from these legacies was accepted throughout the IC-rather than the current environment, which verges on a cultural arms race as each agency promotes its own history and emphasizes its way of doing business.
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