At the risk of repeating myself, I will recommend that people read Cal Newport's blog, and his book: Deep Work. Here is a good blog post on office design that

At the risk of repeating myself, I will recommend that people read Cal Newport's blog, and his book: Deep Work. Here is a good blog post on office design that supports deep work: http://strongproject.com/blog/how-cal-newports-deep-work-concept-will-influence-office-design/ http://strongproject.com/blog/how-cal-newports-deep-work-con... If I ever get a chance to design an office, it will be something like the above. Small risk of that, however. At the risk of sounding like I want to dehumanize work (quite the opposite, actually), I'd like to point out that anybody thinking of adding, say, a new milling machine to a machine shop, would look at how much space you need for it and around it to work productively and have quick access to the necessary accessories. Yet, we don't put any analysis at all into what it takes to maximize the productivity of people. And too often, we go for one-size-fits-all solutions. I can imagine a high-functioning dev-ops team really benefiting from the instantaneous communication of having all 8 people on the team sitting within a short chair roll of each other in a common space. For the people who need long blocks of unbroken concentration, that kind of space is not as functional. "Interrupt driven" work and "deep though" work are two different kinds of work, and it should be no surprise that a single space is not optimal for both.