Comments on: New Work(Space)

By: jackson

jackson — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:17:22 +0000

You are a little late. In the mid-to-late 90’s the advertising agency Chiat Day tired this in both their LA and NY offices – no assigned offices, hot-desking etc. It was an expensive, unmitigated disaster and quality creative people fled the firm, nearly killing it. Why? It was completely anonymous. People would commit to meetings in public spaces and have to call each other’s mobile phones to figure out who they were meeting. Nobody knew where to find anyone from day to day, and nobody ever felt like they had a place in the firm. Really, nobody. And the lucky few who had assigned offices (accounting and the most senior) were resented with a vengeance.
There is a lot of real data coming out that successful businesses need a combination of real offices where you can close the door and concentrate, and public areas where either groups can work, or people can encounter each other randomly and strike up conversations in some mix of public and private. ‘White space’ serves a function where people have no privacy (e.g. cubicles). The rest turns out to be trend and nonsense (surprise!). Let’s get over the fashion and start creating real spaces for real, complex people. Sorry if it costs some money, but we are worth it.

By: ZoeBoniface

ZoeBoniface — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 23:48:41 +0000

The business of using face-to-face in the office for personal chats and email for work communications makes a lot of sense. Most of the time, if you are personally acquainted with your correspondee, written memos are efficient. You write when you choose, they read and respond as they choose, and you have an easily filed record of the interchange.

However, a close working relationship usually needs a bit of real social interaction. Our human hardware and software need a wide spectrum of sensory data to assess another person. Can you trust them? Did they understand what you said (and vice versa)? Body posture, facial expression, tone of voice…. OK, maybe you could get all of these on a webcam, but I’ve just read a news story about how people can recognize a friend from a stranger on the basis of personal SMELL. Test subjects in an MRI were exposed to the smells of people they knew, as well as those of strangers. Personal human odors skip the brain’s usual pathways for smell-monitoring and classification; they trigger a short-cut route through a more primitive part of the brain. The smell of a stranger alerts you to a source of possible danger. You become more generally alert, without being consciously aware of it. If SMELL can do this to us, what else might we learn from face-to-face without being consciously aware of it?

That social chat in the office isn’t just emotionally rewarding (a subject for another day); I think it lubricates the later exchange of written words. At the very least, it probably will curb your urge to send a ‘flame’.

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 19:00:14 +0000

This reminds me a lot of what it’s like being a student in college–you grab space in the library or find a favorite nook in one of the buildings and start typing away. It seems like a lot of the bureaucratic elements of office life would have to change to make this a sustainable work situation for a company. A paperless office is a must, because if there are no offices, there are also no places for personal paper files. I’m sure this setup also creates nightmares for office managers because they never would know where to find people to deliver mail, get signatures, etc.

Maybe the creative class revolution needs to encourage a bureaucratic revolution as well!

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:58:01 +0000

When you flush one of those public toilets, part of the draining water becomes mist and coats the walls of the stall with fecal coliform bacteria. I guess they probably aren’t that harmful, but it is still pretty gross.