The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration

And I can hear someone droning on in the background now, and it's stopping me from concentrating.

>"Rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM"

This isn't what I see at all. Instead, I see basically two kinds of people: one group is the kind mentioned here, who use IM to talk to people a few desks over, but the other group is loud-mouths who just love to get up and go talk to someone in an open area, and drone on loudly for 30-60 minutes talking about something that could have been handled by email or IM, or perhaps even in a meeting in a conference room, rather than disrupting everyone around.

It only takes a couple of these loud-mouths to make the open work environment miserable for everyone else.