Oh my. Good luck with that, gentlemen.
>According to research in neuroscience, this kind of visual chaos can help workers stay more alert, by asking them to constantly reengage with their environment.
Alert != attentive.
Basically, when I'm at risk to lose focus from task at hand, this steals it, and it's rather boring compared to what would most likely be highly abstract contemplations, totally new ideas and so on, so your focus returns to original task since immediate alternative provided is dull affair.
It somehow "eats up" part of my nature that nudges me to lose focus. It's maybe analogous to how rain noise gobbles up various distracting sounds.
For those unaware, I recommend reading up on "inattentional blindness". Attention is a very valuable resource.
The example he used was the sort of problem where there's a obvious, but wrong, answer to a problem (e.g. "If a bat and ball cost £1.10, and the bat is £1 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost", to which a lot of people instinctively answer 10p - using what he refers to as "System 1 thinking"). These sorts of question were presented to two groups of people, one with the questions clearly printed and one with the questions badly printed in very light colours, requiring the readers to concentrate to be able to even read the questions.
The surprising result was that people in the latter group did significantly better on average than those in the former, suggesting that because they are forced to start using the more conscious, and more conscientious, "System 2 thinking" to be able to read the questions, they are primed to use that sort of thinking on actually answering the question.
This isn't always true though - if you're already concentrating heavily on something, then introducing another problem that requires a lot of concentration, you will stop concentrating on the first issue.
So, introducing something that forces your brain into a low-level System 2 mindset (such as slightly wonky offices) might be a good way of reducing the number of "obvious but wrong" decisions being made, but wouldn't be a good way of improving problem solving for tasks where people are already concentrating on the problem.
Future iterations will involve individual angry badgers in climbing harnesses located above each developer's desk. `git blame' will identify the build-breaking commit and react accordingly.
Back in the white collar world, if there's a business problem that makes the "uncomfortableness" or increases the number of moving parts in the environment increase by 10 the people who operate daily at 5 are better prepared than those that operate at 2 (200% increase vs 500% increase).
I think it would be interesting to apply a practice like this to IT (and other support service) operations. If day to day operations can be made to have a similar work flow as a crisis, people will be better prepared to deal with a crisis when things like remembering that "X casually mentioned configuring something oddly in Y manner because of Z at lunch" and deciding "we need to ask X about Y before we do something to Z" while trying to resolve the crisis because those little domino can have a huge effect if you don't prevent them from cascading.
I'll venture a guess that the odd floor plan keeps people on their toes, increasing alertness and the overall overlaps with what would result from increased attentiveness. The question is whether or not the overhead and inefficiency will pay off and how it affects people in the long run. I suspect this model doesn't scale well.