[nessus42]

I've always had an office until the last few years. Now I work in a cubicle. My feeling is that communication was much easier for me in an environment with offices. The reason for this is that I could have in-depth conversation with others in an office. In a cubicle, I feel that having a conversation with someone else is antisocial because it will annoy everyone else.

The real reason for cubicles and open floor plans is that it makes the bean counters happier. Everything else is rationalization, IMHO.

[icebraining]

Are the two really opposed? At my job, we have an open floor plan and a couple of closed rooms where people go for conversations, talking on the phone, etc. Seems to work fine, although I don't have much of a gauge to measure by.

[nessus42]

We tend to call those "meetings" rather than "conversations".

[ericras]

What if two people need to work together on a computer and they only have desktops. The commom-area closed room doesn't do them any good.

[grannyg00se]

The common-area closed room should have a desktop computer in it.