The TL;DR is, Bell Labs was designed to balance casual, collaborative conversations with solo deep work.
1. Instead of having a computer science building, a physics building, etc, they put every discipline in the same building. They had shared areas for eating & discussing which pushed people to run into each other, and have highly cross-domain conversations.
2. Inside the building, the offices were a hub and spoke model. Individual researchers had quiet individual offices for deep thinking they could retreat to AFTER they've bumped into someone at lunch from a different field.
In most open offices today, we've forgotten about the deep work spaces and ONLY kept the collaboration spaces.
The TL;DR is, Bell Labs was designed to balance casual, collaborative conversations with solo deep work.
1. Instead of having a computer science building, a physics building, etc, they put every discipline in the same building. They had shared areas for eating & discussing which pushed people to run into each other, and have highly cross-domain conversations.
2. Inside the building, the offices were a hub and spoke model. Individual researchers had quiet individual offices for deep thinking they could retreat to AFTER they've bumped into someone at lunch from a different field.
In most open offices today, we've forgotten about the deep work spaces and ONLY kept the collaboration spaces.