This might indulge managers to simply build big social gathering spaces and expect great result. But the firms have to understand firstly what they’re trying to achieve (higher productivity? more creativity?) before changing a space. What it suggests is to have a space right at the center, which allows ample interactions to take place. But what is doesn’t suggest is to follow this concept blindly. There has to be a great deal of substance to back it off.
Let’s now look at Xerox’s Wilson Center for Research and Technology. The firm created the “LX Common” to encourage informal encounters among employees in separate groups. The Common afforded great proximity: It was centrally located and was traversed by people walking from the main entrance to their labs, from one lab to another, and to the conference room. It contained the kitchen, the photocopier and printers, and key reference materials, and this functional centrality also drove traffic. But as teams started having conversations and meetings there, people began taking long detours around it.[1] <file:///C:/Users/dell/Desktop/Sem-8/ResearchPaper/rough%20draft.docx#_ftn1> *The problem?* The Common created so much proximity and so little privacy that engineers couldnʼt pass through without risking being sucked into a meeting, informal or otherwise. So they avoided the space altogether. By looking at both the examples one can understand that there has to be *a balance between proximity & privacy of the space*, so that one can have both “*open and shut*” conversations and encounters. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
