At miniSPA2007 on Monday I joined Mike Hill’s session on “Designing Collaborative Workspaces”. Mike asked us to consider, from our experience, what made specific workspaces good or bad. We were then asked to consider a scenario in which we first designed an inappropriate workspace for our team and then an appropriate workspace for our team according to a predefined scenario.

This process was aided by copious amounts of lego, plasticine, straws, pipecleaners etc - but no sticky-backed plastic as far as I could see. Peter Marks and Nat Pryce particularly impressed with their artistic skills.

In terms of badly designed workspaces some of the following problems seemed to crop up frequently:

• Failure to locate people who work closely near each other
• Furniture that was inappropriate to the task e.g. desks you can’t pair-program at, furniture that’s difficult to rearrange, massive filing cabinets for team’s working with little documentation
• Noisy atmospheres e.g. having piped music
• Having to swipe out / in to visit the toilet
• Lack of communal (meeting) areas
• Lack of whiteboards, wall space for charts etc.

My own personal bugbears include

• workspaces with powerful smells e.g. strong perfume or cooking smells,
• workspaces that are miles from any useful non-work facility,
• workspaces which are through-routes for all sorts of other company traffic,
• workspaces with insufficient storage,
• workspaces which are taken over by others outside the team,
• workspaces that are used as a dumping ground by others and
• workspaces with inadequate heating / cooling,
• on an environmental point, workspaces that are also lengthy or unsafe to cycle to get my thumbs down.

The appropriate workspaces addressed most of these problems - in some cases people had adopted tactics such as cannibalising other items or shifting stuff into other people’s areas surreptitiously. There was a pretty strong consensus for the most part on what made a good workspace including space, plants, windows, wall space for posters/charts, whiteboards and a communal space.

It was a fun session as the photos below (courtesy of Andy Moorley’s mobile phone camera) should show. However it had a serious message behind it. If you have a say in how your workspace is laid out then make sure your team’s needs are being catered for.

Rachel Davies, with whom Mike had run the session at SPA 2007, keeps a track of workspace stories through the Informative Workspace web site. Send her your good and bad workspace pictures and stories.

I’m hoping to get Mike to run the session again for SPA Cambridge. It will be interesting to compare results…