- Break out the inspiration (Image: Hufton and Crow/View)
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One way of finding out would have been to observe how colleagues actually move around and interact and then design the office around that. A method that uses body-worn sensors to do this could one day provide a useful way of testing different interior layouts to maximise interactions.
"It's well understood that in creative work environments spontaneous interactions can't be programmed," says Phil Bernstein at Yale University. "But they are important and can be encouraged by the architecture."
So Cecilia Mascolo and colleagues at the University of Cambridge used wearable, wireless sensors to automatically work out how well the layout of common areas in a building – receptions, cafes, kitchens and breakout spaces – encourage this kind of behaviour.
The team worked with a local company that was about to move offices. Forty volunteers among the firm's 230 staff were given short-range radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags to wear for two weeks at both the old and the new building. The RFID antennas were designed to only transmit forwards, over a 1.5-metre range, once per second. That meant two tags could only receive signals from each other if the wearers were close and face to face. Being face-to-face for more than 30 seconds counted as a noteworthy interaction. The new building had been designed to foster more interactions, with doorless meeting rooms, a large central cafeteria and vending machines in two large entranceways.
They found 59 per cent of face-to-face interactions in the old building were between members of different research groups. That rose, as the architects had hoped, to 76 per cent in the new one. "That's a good thing for research, as serendipitous chats might mean new connections and ideas," says Mascolo. The research was presented at the Ubicomp conference in Seattle last week.
The work could encourage firms to adjust their interior layouts to maximise interactions. "Many aspects of modern buildings are reconfigurable," notes Mascolo. Even better, such data could be added into building design software to help create the perfect work environment, she says.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Informal-chat tracker to design the perfect office"