By far the most popular blog post I’ve written on this site with more than 6,500 views to date (and counting) was written more than ten years ago, in 2014, on the topic of office configurations that support different forms of sociability. In ‘Figures, doors and passages – revisited. Or: Does your office allow for…
A couple of weeks ago, floor plan and seating arrangements of the 250 people running the General Election campaign for the Labour party were revealed in the Guardian. The article outlined teams and their tasks, where they all sat and how the war room operated on a day-to-day basis. It is a fascinating account of life inside a…
This blog post was born out of serendipity. Which is only fitting, since it also covers the idea of serendipity. It all started with a typical day in my life as an academic: I did about ten different things at the same time and two of them suddenly created an unexpected connection in my mind;…
This last post in the series ‘ Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices‘ will focus on the issue of workplace configuration, more specifically it will look at open-plan offices. The open-plan office has taken a battering recently both in the media with headlines such as “Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the…
In this fourth instalment of my blog series ‘Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices’ I want to look at common layout choices and the consequences these choices have. A very popular myth in office design asserts that an open-plan office accommodation is preferable because it increases communication among colleagues in contrast to a…
This week’s blog post of the series ‘Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices‘ will look a bit closer at the activities of people in offices; more specifically, it will focus on movement. There isn’t really a myth to be dispelled this time, I rather want us to take a fresh look at how…
While last week’s post “The Office Is Not Dead” established that we still need the physicality of a shared workplace in order to create awareness, co-presence, encounter and identity among employees, this week’s second blog post in the series 5 Things You Might Not Know About Offices will focus on patterns of communication. The myth…
Myths and common preconceptions about offices and workplaces abound. We are almost constantly bombarded with supposedly new ideas about management, workplace design, workplace trends and the general debate on the ‘future of the office’. Quite often it is merely terminology that is reinvented (‘Agile Working’), attempting to add a new sparkle to old (and possibly…
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal on ‘The New Science of Who Sits Where at Work‘ highlighted some interesting facts about behaviours of people in the workplace: the fact that 40-60% of our interactions are with immediate office neighbours; that bringing people from different teams and departments into close proximity can increase productivity;…
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