>I'd be curious to know if there's a verifiable correlation between brightness levels and how loud people tend to talk. There's something about a dim room that

>I'd be curious to know if there's a verifiable correlation between brightness levels and how loud people tend to talk. There's something about a dim room that seems to induce people to lower their voices. Almost every open office I've worked in has been super loud and disruptive, but one of them that happened to have high ceilings and very soft, warm lighting turned and turned out to be the fantastic. Something about the space gave the room a kind of library-style hush, which I think helped create a feedback loop compelling people to speak quietly and move longer conversations into closed rooms. I think there's also an element to establishing the culture of how you interact in the open space early on, I think even with the hushed atmosphere of the room itself, it only worked because people had been talking quietly and taking louder conversations into private rooms for as long as they'd been working in the space. Pulling back from a culture of having a boisterous open space to a quiet one is, I think, much harder than doing it from the get-go.