But an open-plan office layout assumes that all communication happens most effectively with only one possible type of communication: real-time, constantly preemptible audio streams.
It’s shallow to say that “information sharing” happens this way, since for many people it obviously impedes or completely prevents information sharing.
> “What's interesting is how pragmatically an environment actually works and what it's real life pros/cons are.”
I agree on this, which is why it only requires such a short analysis to see that open-plan offices fail so one-sidedly. They are empirically shown to be widely disliked, to lower morale, to lower producivity (both individually and overall), to lead to more superficial interaction and less deep communication, to lead to more defects in knowledge work outputs, to increase communicable disease transmission and negatively affect sick time and vacation time habits, all while entirely discounting the most pragmatic working styles of at least one huge group of people (introverts) and, when all is said and done, they don’t even save money except in the shallowest, short-term sense, and often companies spend on opulent luxury features in order for the workers to appear essentially as decorative office furniture for when investors or upper management walk by.
It is more than fair to call this phenomenon shallow.
It’s shallow to say that “information sharing” happens this way, since for many people it obviously impedes or completely prevents information sharing.
> “What's interesting is how pragmatically an environment actually works and what it's real life pros/cons are.”
I agree on this, which is why it only requires such a short analysis to see that open-plan offices fail so one-sidedly. They are empirically shown to be widely disliked, to lower morale, to lower producivity (both individually and overall), to lead to more superficial interaction and less deep communication, to lead to more defects in knowledge work outputs, to increase communicable disease transmission and negatively affect sick time and vacation time habits, all while entirely discounting the most pragmatic working styles of at least one huge group of people (introverts) and, when all is said and done, they don’t even save money except in the shallowest, short-term sense, and often companies spend on opulent luxury features in order for the workers to appear essentially as decorative office furniture for when investors or upper management walk by.
It is more than fair to call this phenomenon shallow.