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Avoiding the Cube Farm - Effective Office Floor Plans?
scorp1us asks: "My company, after cramming 30 people into 3000sq feet, has a new lease on life in a 7700sq foot office (pun blatantly intended!). We are primarily a 3D animation/software company and we hope to avoid the cube farm design, but with a large open area in the middle, it is the default solution. We would like to know what effective strategies are used at other places that avoid the cube farm, and produce an inspiring, motivating work environment. This location has a split level and 12' ceilings, so it has a lot of potential."
With some subtle variation, the cube farm can be transformed from a soulless cell block into something that actually improves productivity. If you organize each functional team's cubes around their own central open areas, communication between team members will improve significantly.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
I've spent some time in those kinds of environments. The "number of people" vs "somebody doing something distracting" graph is an exponential curve.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
This does not work well in an enviroment with lots of phone usage.
I dub thee... Sir Phobos, Knight of Mars, Beater of Ass.
Errr....any architect worth their fee will be able to do everything that you've mentioned here. Sounds like you've been reading one too many new-age-hippy interior magazines.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
I like this arrangement, too. I'd point out a couple of additional things, though:
It helps if unrelated people are sound-isolated from you, either by distance or by walls. Having too many people you can overhear is distracting, and being able to overhear people who are talking about stuff that isn't relevant is very distracting. It also helps if everybody you can hear can see you (cubes are terrible this way), because people get social cues about how many people they're distracting.
Expect people to be away from the office during the heavy development time. There's generally a period after all of the issues are settled, before integration and testing, when there's just a mass of code that has to get written, and some people will be a lot faster at this if they're not distracted by coworkers. People may also work funny hours for this reason, or listen to music on headphones. Insist that people overlap and pay attention at some point regularly, but not for most of the time.
I have no clue what people other than developers need. But the developers shouldn't be able to hear or see them, wherever they are.
That office design violates the most important guideline of Feng shui, which is that when sitting at the desk, you must have the doorway in clear sight. This is also a good idea because it relieves people of the nervousness of wondering who might be standing in the doorway looking in. And besides, it gives you enough time to switch back to the desktop your real work is on.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars