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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."
Have you seen Joel's article on what his office looks like? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffic e.html
Scott Adams has written some excellent literature on this: first start by assigning 4000 sq feet to a place called scorp1us-ville, dedicated to illegal gambling and drinking.
If you do use cubicles, don't forget to extort money from people in exchange for larger ones.
When the company I used to work for moved into large office space with cubicles, we chose to create 4-6 person development pits instead of individual cubes. This worked rather well. Each pit basically had a separate team so team members could interact easily and naturally with each other, while providing enough space to avoid feeling crowded.
The openness allowed the developers to bounce ideas off each other and help each other out. Ad-hoc meetings for each team were a snap, everyone could just swivel their chairs to face the center. Meeting times were cut down to about one quarter what gathering everyone into a meeting room spends.
Depending on the personalities, you could try various sizes of pits and maybe have a few individual cubicles for those who really can't work well in open environments. But I think per-person cubicles create a lot of petty territorial issues, which was another thing avoided by the pits.
Put lockable casters on your desks, conference tables, bookcases. (Hopefully your chairs have wheels already.)
Subdivide the central core into 4 sectors with a tall fixed partition wall, so there's a core wall that spaces needing a solid wall (e.g. a conference room whiteboard) can abut. Put power and network jacks in this wall. Run a grid of 3/8" tension cables a few inches below the ceiling across the space on 12" centers (i.e. create a repeating 12"x12" grid of wires near the ceiling.) Space power and network drops regularly in the floor (or, if underfloor jacks are too expensive, in the ceiling.)
Allow teams and individuals to configure workspaces within that space by hanging various-height fabric curtains (weighted to the floor) from that grid with long j-hooks.
Just an idea I thought was neat - I'm sure there are problems with it, but cube walls are a bitch to move around and don't permit organic shapes or long, straight divisions with no perpendicular support. You could have individuals in C-shaped pods within an open area, or circular common workspaces with desks on the circumference, or any other configuration - and individual teams don't need someone from facilities to show up with tools to move things around, just a grasping pole to reach the j-hook (and maybe a ladder if you put your drops in the ceiling rather than the floor.)
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
This is a problem for an architect.
A good architect is specifically skilled in making good spaces, and will be able to come up with ideas which you hadn't thought of, and will help you to make the most of the space you have to work with.
Aura Module
Well, they have doors. So you're basically saying if you have a private space with walls up to the ceiling, windows and doors, that's a cubicle.
English is my second language, but I would rather call it an office.
Fleur de Sel
Although the parent posted AC, they are actually good questions. What you need is someone asking questions like this, so you/they can work out what it is that you actually need. It's called developing a brief, and if you're serious about having a fairly innovative office space then you should definitely engage an architect or space-planner with experience in "new office design", who can help with this and with the office layout. Probably the best known group in this field is DEGW - http://www.degw.com/
If you decide to go it alone, then you need to think really rationally about every aspect of your company. Most people here have suggested various layouts of cubes, some of which are pretty good, but you need to go a bit further than that. The one reason that companies are getting interested in changing their workplace design is that the quality of the work place environment is very important to people - especially younger generations - and to attract and retain the best and brightest you need to have an office that appeals to them. The other reason is that you can see tangible benefits by getting staff out of the silo-metality that cubes and single offices generate, and into spaces where they can communicate with each other. This is especially important if your business depends on people working together in teams.
So looking at a really basic level, you need to work our how your business operates. If you have a number of project teams, then you need to get the people in a team together. If your teams change frequently then you might put everything on casters like one other poster suggested. What we do in our own office is have desks without any dividers which are then clustered into groups for each project team. Some outsiders don't like this - because they feel it's too noisy or open - but in reality this is not an issue. With the slight increase in ambient noise, the office doesn't feel as interrupted when a phone rings, or when someone is having a conversation. This actually helps people communicate more freely and openly! - which is a good thing for the kind of work we do. However, if your business relies on lots of individuals doing their own thing - like lawyers or researchers, then you may want a whole load of little offices. This is fine - it's just thinking about a team of 1 rather than a team of say 6. The biggest team you should consider is about 20-30. After this size people won't work together as a single unit.
After working the team structure out, all these people are going to need somewhere to meet. Meeting spaces are generally noisy, so you want to cluster them away from the general working area rather than mixing everything up. Think about arranging your office into 4 general areas - entry, noisy, workgroup, quiet. The noisy places - meeting areas, kitchens, social spaces - should go near the entry and encourage people to bump into one another. It's amazing how much sharing of ideas and information happens in these areas. You should consider social spaces and kitchens as part of the work-space, and encourage people to use them. The workgroup space is obviously where most of your desks are - arranged in teams or however. It's good to provide some really quiet spaces at the ends of the workgroup zone for people to make private calls, or sit to work on specific work without interruptions.
Ok - so much writing and I've only really begun....which is why I think you should hire an architect! But either way, good luck with your new office.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Know the code before you speak. There are no obvious Code violations in this article. No mention of using extension cords to connect outlets. In fact, there are no Code-related construction comments at all. If I could, I'd both comment and moderate your post as a troll. Slashdot rules, unfortunately, prevent that. Your current "3, Informative" is a testament to the weakness of this system.
The six disconnect rule is for buildngs, not individual suites of offices. The rule is in place for safety, essentially allowing firefighters to ensure the building is electrically dead in short order. The Code doesn't require that an office UPS be switched off at the service entrance.
Each UPS should be on a branch circuit with appropriate overcuurrent and short circuit protection. Nothing in the article indicates otherwise. Additionally, outlets downstream from the UPS are not the same as outlets on a branch circuit. In this case, the UPS determines both the branch circuit rating and the acceptable load on each outlet, not the Code.