Archinect - News

From prayer rooms to “meeting pods”, quiet spaces are being revived in open-plan offices

2020-02-19T16:00:00-05:00

More than a decade since the swing toward open-plan offices — and the resulting backlash from workers concerned about noise and a lack of privacy — a host of ancillary spaces are cropping up in workplaces, offering employees an escape from their (sometimes overly loud) co-workers. These private spaces include prayer rooms, wellness rooms and libraries [...] All of which prompts the question: After pulling down the walls that defined yesterday’s workplaces, are we once again putting them up?

Are phone-booth-sized offices the future of workstations?

2019-08-30T08:00:00-04:00

The idea of a workspace has transformed over the past decade, in large part, due to the emergence of co-working spaces like WeWork and Industrious. The shift has fueled the proliferation of the "open office," and the many documented problems associated with the setup. Is the pendulum ready to swing back to a focus on single-person workspaces?

Mitsubishi Estate Co., a Japanese real estate investment company, thinks so and has offered a potential solution to the problem of the open-office: a phone-booth-sized mini-workspace for one. Meet Telecube, the 13-square-foot, soundproof workspace that comes complete with a desk, seat, and power outlets.

In collaboration with office furniture maker Okamura Corp. and video-conferencing software vendor V-Cube Inc, Mistsubishi Estate Co. has unveiled plans to install 1,000 Telecube units by 2023. According to recent coverage from Bloomberg: "The companies are betting there will be enough demand for the mini workstations. Coffee shops in Tokyo ar...

Open offices are closing people off from each other more, according to this recent study

2018-07-20T20:17:00-04:00

Bernstein hopes the research will offer empirical evidence that will help managers consider the possible trade-offs of moving to an open office plan. In seeking a lower cost per square foot, they buy into the idea that it will also lead to more collaboration, even if it’s not clear that’s true. “I don’t blame the architects,” he said. “But I do think we spend more of our time thinking about how to design workspaces based on the observer’s perspective” — the manager — “rather than the observed.”

If you're not a fan of open offices, you now have some empirical evidence in your favor. In two field studies recently published by Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban, they found that face-to-face interaction decreased by approximately 70 percent in both cases, while digital communication increased.

“In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM,” the researchers write in the abstract of the study.

Our Cubicles, Ourselves: How the Modern Office Shapes American Life

2014-04-15T13:44:00-04:00

And hierarchies don’t disappear when you place everyone at a communal table or “superdesk”; they persist in more subtle modes of workplace interaction. I suspect that people thrown into open plans might even miss their cubicles. And there are features of cubicles—such as the need to partition wide spaces—that I suspect will continue to be useful and never go away; these needs precede the invention of the cubicle itself.

Read more about the development of the American workplace in Archinect's feature article, Aftershock #2: "Serendipity Machines" and the Future of Workplace Design.

The Open-Office Trap

2014-01-08T13:16:00-05:00