[eambutu]

Oh interesting, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Right now I'd say we're still in this "skewmorphic transition," where we gain a lot from just replicating more aspects of real life, and since it analogizes very easily people know what to do with it. As things become more mature and people become situated with it, we'll definitely be asking how we can break physical constraints and if there's a fundamentally better arrangement.

[roguesherlock]

I actually haven’t thought deeply about this topic yet.

I think it’s a tricky to judge whether re-inventing the wheel is important and would yield better results or one should just stick with the norms.

And I genuinely believe that we definitely need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to workplaces. Trying to translate a physical workplace to a digital one seems logical but doesn’t feel right. And more importantly, if you come from that side, it surely makes the transition easier for people, but makes it very hard to re-invent the wheel because your lens (how you look at the problem) is now biased.

But then how do you re-invent the wheel?

I think one way is to just question everything and see if the past conclusions still hold true in this new reality. Once you have enough conclusions, you can maybe begin to think about how to model a solution with those conclusions in mind. Makes sense ?

[eambutu]

I see! I think another angle, is to first create a virtual analog of a workplace, but then since it's virtual, it's super flexible and easy to experiment with. I think there's only so far you can get with these questions, off reasoning alone.

Another example of a project I worked on, which was similar, was this VR office: https://siemprecollective.com/vr.html . We basically made a one-to-one mapping of our physical office in VR, and the idea was after we had that, we could play around and tweak things very easily. And actually being able to TRY these new experiments was the whole point.