Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsplittgerber | Hacker News Reader

One can only applaud this. You do wonder sometimes why companies spent so few $$ on relaxing office buildings. Looking into nature increases productivity and well-being; also there are a lot of findings on how to organize work floors for optimal collaboration etc. Most companies are just not interested. Doesn't make sense to me (except for short-term profits).

View on HN

I was watching 'The Pixar Story' the other day and they talked about the campus they opened in 2000. Jobs talked about the importance of 'unplanned interactions' and workplace being key to the success of a creative company.

http://www.armchaircommentary.com/2011/10/amazon-goes-to-pix...

"Main Building

The Pixar campus opened in 2000. It was built on the location of an old canning factory and the factory vibe inspired the architecture. Steve Jobs, one of the Pixar founders was heavily involved in the design. He wanted Pixar's main building to serve as a central gathering place where employees would come several times a day to interact and share ideas. In service of this goal a cafeteria, coffee shop and the employee mail room were clustered within steps of each other within the atrium of the main building. Pixar lore is that Jobs was so obsessed with the idea of all employees venturing to this area at least once a day that he advocated for only having one bathroom on the campus. He was overruled."

For the curious, "The Pixar Story" is available on Netflix Instant

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Pixar_Story/70083532?t...

On the other hand, more and more offices at Apple are in lockdown areas (where the badge that gives you access to the building does not necessarily give you access). It's going to be interesting to see how these two forces interact with each other. Cafeterias and common areas have been exempt from the lockdown trend, but I'm not sure if this is sufficient in the long term to guarantee enough "unplanned interactions".

Yeah, it's about short-term profits but also because many people still don't think of style or taste as being important to their long-term profits either.

Agreed, I can only hope if America keeps shifting toward high tech jobs, corporate leader will realize that the most efficient companies will win out; and nothing makes for an efficient company like happy employees. Not everyone is going to be able to make cool building looking out into nature, but employee happiness should be addressed somewhere in the budget.

I am aware about the nature/well-being (I even read a study regarding sports performance), but I have no knowledge on the findings on how to organize work floors. Care to share some links? Thanks.

Start with Jane Jacobs (google her, quite famous), then read her "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". It's helps you understand why cities work, why they don't, what makes a neighbourhood, what destroys them and how almost everything city planners and governments think matters, actually doesn't.

After that, read the Malcolm Gladwell article how her findings can be applied to office culture. http://www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_12_11_a_working.html

After all that, apply all that to offices you've seen.

The Jane Jacobs book looks fascinating, I just ordered a copy along with some other books I was buying :) Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com