Offices exist for a variety of reasons: Supervision, access to information (paper files), equipment (phones, computers), status signaling, and moving informatio

Offices exist for a variety of reasons: Supervision, access to information (paper files), equipment (phones, computers), status signaling, and moving information efficiently. The "collaboration" ruse seems like a recent invention. Managers collaborate just fine with private offices. Collaboration is certainly valuable, but at the same time, I have a hunch that 90% of the time spent collaborating, is spent getting the stuff done that you agreed to do. Also, much of the communication involved in collaboration is not necessarily done best in front of an audience. These may be a couple of the reasons for reports that open-plan offices actually degrade collaboration. A lot of the time I spent in libraries as a grad student was doing work that contributed to a collaboration. Likewise a lot of the coding that I do in isolation.