This short case study illustrates that you often have to work within the constraints of existing buildings. You can’t necessarily adapt these or have as much space as you would like. In this example, Alice has used a single office as a space for concentrated work and has confined development work, where people will be discussing what to do, to a single room. Shared desks are increasingly common for team members who are not always working in the office. As each member of the team have a laptop, they can work anywhere—at their desk, in the quiet room or in the shared social spaces in the building.
Alice understands the importance of working environments but her company is based in a 1970s building that can’t be adapted to an ideal structure. She is assigned three offices for her team—a small, separate individual office and two adjacent larger offices that can each hold four desks.
Two team members (Carol and Brian) often work from home and Fred, the alarm expert, only works with the team two days per week. The team has access to a meeting room shared by other groups, and each floor in the building has a coffee space for informal interaction. Rather than use the small office as her personal office, as intended by management, Alice decides that this should be a quiet ‘thinking’ space that can be used by any team member who needs to work without distraction.
She sets up one of the offices as a development office with tables for hardware and paper prototypes of user interfaces. This room also has a desk that is mostly used by Fred when he is working with the team but is also shared by Carol and Brian when they are working in the office. Alice shares the other office with Bob, Dorothy and Ed. All team members use laptops and connect to the wireless network. However, desks also have larger screens and keyboards that can be plugged into any machine.