A study has found that the hustle and bustle of modern offices can lead to a 32% drop in workers well being and reduce their productivity by 15%.

They have found that open plan offices create unwanted activity in the brains of workers that can get in the way of them doing the task at hand.

Open plan offices were first introduced in the 1950s and quickly became a popular as a way of laying out offices.

Having a clean and sterile desk can also leave employees with smaller brains, scientists claim.

The findings are revealed in a programme made for Channel 4, The Secret Life of Buildings, to be broadcast on Monday.

This type of research, IMHO, has implications for both our online and physical workplaces. Implementing a sterile, impersonal intranet is probably as bad as a clean desk policy.

But for physical workspaces at least, why does it always have to be one or other - open plan OR individual offices, work from the office OR work from home?

With self-service, the transaction costs of managing information appear to have fallen. But the real costs have not gone away. In fact, they've risen as they shifted from lower-cost administrative staff to professionals — hidden in the salaries of professional staff who start early, stay late and spend weekends checking email, searching, answering questions on discussion boards and organizing documents. Though it only takes a few minutes here and there, self-service information management consumes a significant portion of our personal and professional lives. Anyone with a slightly complex problem booking a flight on-line, seeking computer tech support, comparative shopping or using different software to participate in discussion forums, find an expert, or document an insight understands how much time this consumes.

Self-service has another consequence. It takes professionals' attention away from their real job, which is to use information to think.

You might be surprised, but I don't believe that self-service is the answer to everything. l've actually written a few things in the past about this point of view (see my articles page: 'Beyond HR Self-Service' and 'Empower customers with self-service, not automation').

What's surprising here is that Richard McDermott is effectively describing in his article a knowledge management approach that is a decade or more old. But its one that is still very much applicable, even in an era of social software and big data. Web 2.0 and social software should not automatically mean self-service - that's entirely the wrong perspective.

Hat tip to Jack.

I love Xplane's visual meditations but this one caught my attention today because it reminds me of a simple ethnographic approach I like to use in my consulting work.

For many people, their desk represents the intersection between their physical workspace and their digital workspace. So, this make it an interesting place to directly experience and observe as part of the user-centred design process.

However, where this isn't possible maybe sketching your desk could be an alternative way of engaging with people about the people, places and things they interact with?

The authors of this short piece on collaboration propose 12 categories of knowledge worker that they have matched to different collaboration technologies that have defined as being well suited, adequate or ill suited.

I'm a little worried about some of the suggested technologies (they recommend fax machines for some, but why not scan-to-email?) and I think you need to be careful to rule out a tool that is marked as ill suited for collaboration as it might still have application to that knowledge worker *outside* the domain of collaboration itself. However, even thinking about the 12 categories does help to raise awareness that different knowledge workers have different collaboration needs, and that's a good thing!

They also 10 forms of waste in collaboration, which might be a great starting point for putting together a business case to support collaboration with technology.