BBC's plush and stylish new offices in Salford, near Manchester, are sprinkled with "collaboration pods".
The idea is that useful work happens when people talk to each other, face to face, rather than sit around in closed-door offices. Doing away with offices and having these collaboration pods should encourage people to do just that. However, having sufferred in new-age work spaces for decades, I have a hunch these pods aren't really going to foster collaboration.
Collaboration generally happens when people sit at right angles to each other, or in an arc, facing a white-board. It happens at coffee machines or water coolers, when people stand at right angles to each other, or in an arc, and the space above the coffee machine or water cooler becomes an air white-board.
Collaboration doesn't happen when two people are sitting squarely opposite each other. This is how people sit at an interview, when they are assessing or evaluating each other. These collaboration pods feel too open for most recruitment interviews, and anyway the interviews I give usually need a table-top work surface and a whiteboard. But these collaboration pods might just have struck the perfect balance between openness and privacy for a speed date. Perhaps speed-romance will now bloom amongst BBC staffers in Salford, near Manchester.
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