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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
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.
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.