This document discusses the ongoing tension in office design between collaboration and individual focus or concentration. It has become more challenging with modern remote and mobile workforces. The document explores solutions some companies have implemented like Uber's "work caves" that provide solitary spaces without closing doors, and open offices separated from private meeting rooms and intermediate zones created by permeable aluminum louvers. The tension is not new, as a book from 1902 discussed employers seeing offices as machines for control, but modern solutions aim to balance individual and group work needs.

1. Universitatea de Știin e Agronomiceț și Medicină Veterinară
București
Facultatea de Management, Inginerie În Agricultura și
Dezvoltare Rurală
Specializarea: Inginerie Economică în Agricultură
Coordonator: Frumușelu Mihai
Student: Nae Adrian Csomin
Neacsu Danut
Grupa: 8202

2. In the past 40 years, the basic tension in office design – between collaboration
and concentration – has not been resolved. This challenge has never been more
important than today, when the labour force is filled with perma-temps,
technology allows workers to be fully mobile, and employers are pushing to
reduce their real estate footprints.

3. At the same time, the Uber office includes “work caves,”
upholstered niches where employees can work on solitary
projects without closing a door on their colleagues. The
goal is to balance space for individual tasks with room for
collaboration. “We know there are issues with the open
office,” Cherry continues. “Introverts can’t focus the way
they need to.”

4. Open office spaces are
separated from glassed-in,
soundproof meeting areas;
for in-between zones,
screens of aluminum louvers
provide permeable walls of
visual and aural privacy.
“Those louvers help to break
up sight lines and sound,”
adds designer Jonathan
Sabine. “You can create a
hierarchy of privacy in these
spaces – when they need
privacy, it has to be
absolute, and then there are
desks. But there’s an in-
between.”

5. That tension is an old one. In his recent book Cubed: A Secret History of
the Workplace, cultural critic Nikil Saval traces two centuries’ worth of
office culture. His account makes clear that employers have always seen
the office as a machine to create hierarchy and control staff.

6. Steve Jobs, when he was chief executive of Pixar, pushed for its open
headquarters to include an atrium space where all employees would have
to, at some point, bump into each other. Fifteen years later, that model
has been widely adopted.

7. Bibliografie: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/