All the warnings pre-pandemic researchers in the area of open plan offices have of course come home to roost. The article below links to a new edition of a much awarded book by Joseph G. Allen and John D. Macomber titled Healthy Buildings first published in 2020 and updated in October 2022 with additional research …
Five years ago, I put together a research paper on the problems of open plan offices in universities. These problems were by no means limited to the higher education sector but were evident across multiple industries. One of the points I raised related to the dangers of disease transmission. Of course, this is now a …
A new study conducted by Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban with yet more confirmation of the problems with open plan office space is currently attracting wide attention in the media and on the web. Of course, the study does no more than confirm what has already been argued at length elsewhere and what workers …
More discussion in a radio program with views from a variety of experts, researchers and workers around the problems of open plan. Is open plan a good way to work? – Life Matters – ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). 6 July 2015 “Open plan is a popular in home design and offices but is …
An example of the kind of building which is currently being constructed by universities in Australia. Interestingly, in this rendering, nobody actually seems to be doing any real work. And unless I missed it, there is a glaring absence of reference to the space that staff will be spending most of their time working in. …
I have put together a general – but still very select – bibliography of material on open-plan office design, which you can download as a PDF. All items have links for easy consultation. The bibliography includes the following subheadings: Academic articles on open-plan: General Academic articles on open-plan: Universities Online newspaper and magazine articles/Websites: General …
Academic Office Space: An argument against open-plan Clare O’Farrell May 2015 This post is also available as a PDF Additional general bibliography on open-plan office design Note: all the references in this text are listed at the end of this paper with hyperlinks for easy consultation. The anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally …
In doing research on the whole question of open-plan offices for academics, I have come across an enormous amount of material which exposes the problems across all sectors and globally of the open-plan workplace. A particularly well-titled article by Oliver Burkeman appeared in The Guardian in November 2013: Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in …
I have been doing some research around the increasing trend towards constructing open-plan offices for academics in the UK, the USA and Australia and thought this passage from Discipline and Punish might be apposite. Open-plan office design is now widespread across all industry sectors and around the globe and universities are starting to follow suit. …
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