Interesting question, indeed, Richard. How can physical facilities
facilitate learning?
I have both a positive and negative example from my own experience that
may prove a little helpful.
POSITIVE: When I worked for a small (150 employees) company, we did not
try too hard to put the offices of people who worked together next to each
other. This meant that I often had to walk halfway across the building to
get to the office of someone. This, therefore, meant that I passed by (or
met in the hallway) a whole lot of people I would not otherwise have met.
This same company also placed a "lunch room" in the middle of the
building, so it became an intentional and unintentional meeting place for
people walking through or wanting to get some coffee. We used to joke
that most of the "business" of this company got done in hallway meetings
-- and it was somewhat true.
NEGATIVE: Union Carbide, only about a year or so before the Bhopal
disaster (I'm not connecting the events as cause and effect, just stating
a chronology since I don't remember the actual years), moved its corporate
headquarters out of New York City to a new building built especially for
them. It was an innovative building that met some challenging design
criteria. For example, no one was to have to walk very far from their
parking place to their office -- solved by putting the parking ramp in the
middle of the building. Another was to create small-group office
clusters, so people in each "team" would have their offices close
together, and to give everyone (except the lowest-paid, always mistreated
administrative people) a window in their office. This was accomplished by
creating quasi-circular "silos" (they may have been octagonal rather than
circular) that stuck out from the building, within which there could be
about six offices (each with an outside wall, therefore with windows)
clustered around a small central area for files and the administrative
desk(s). These clusters attached, via a short hallway, to the main
hallway that ran around the inside of the building. Since the actual
inside of the building was taken up by a parking ramp, the inner hallway
formed a rectangle that encircled the parking ramp and from which you
could enter the ramp (on the inside) or enter the hallways to the office
clusters (on the outside of the main hallway.)
I hope you can visualize this. What they quickly discovered, however, was
that the building was dysfunctional. It effectively cut off interactions
among people who were not sharing a six-office cluster! No one even had
to traverse the main hallway for any distance (except to get to the
cafeteria -- the one place where mingling would occur to some extent),
because coffee and vending machines were located near every office cluster
and the exit to the parking ramp was nearby. Because it was such a long
trek to get to the cafeteria, many people didn't go there -- not even for
lunch, preferring to eat in their offices. So, no person-to-person chance
meetings, casual greetings, etc., occurred. It stifled learning, among
other things, and I believe that they (at great expense) moved out in a
relatively few years to another more conventional building.
Perhaps someone else knows more about this than I. I only worked there as
a consultant for a very short period.
--"John Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>