"Rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM"
In the cases I've seen 'open offices' implemented, its been to cram more people into the same space, and save on real estate costs.
>"Rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM"
This isn't what I see at all. Instead, I see basically two kinds of people: one group is the kind mentioned here, who use IM to talk to people a few desks over, but the other group is loud-mouths who just love to get up and go talk to someone in an open area, and drone on loudly for 30-60 minutes talking about something that could have been handled by email or IM, or perhaps even in a meeting in a conference room, rather than disrupting everyone around.
It only takes a couple of these loud-mouths to make the open work environment miserable for everyone else.
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[ 91.7 ms ] story [ 92.1 ms ] threadIn the cases I've seen 'open offices' implemented, its been to cram more people into the same space, and save on real estate costs.
This isn't what I see at all. Instead, I see basically two kinds of people: one group is the kind mentioned here, who use IM to talk to people a few desks over, but the other group is loud-mouths who just love to get up and go talk to someone in an open area, and drone on loudly for 30-60 minutes talking about something that could have been handled by email or IM, or perhaps even in a meeting in a conference room, rather than disrupting everyone around.
It only takes a couple of these loud-mouths to make the open work environment miserable for everyone else.