When Google popularized the open-plan office in the mid-2000s, the business world followed at breakneck speed. Then came the research — and the bad news. In this May 2020 piece, Prakash Nair and Louis Sirota ask what schools, often tempted by the same wide-open layouts, should take from the corporate world’s expensive lesson.
Open-plan offices promised collaboration and serendipity. In practice, studies found they often reduced face-to-face interaction, increased distraction and stress, and left people retreating behind headphones. The problem was not openness itself, but openness without variety — a single, undifferentiated space expected to support every kind of work at once.
The school parallel
Schools moving away from the closed classroom sometimes overcorrect into one large, undifferentiated room — and inherit exactly the problems that sank open-plan offices. The answer is not to retreat to cells and corridors, but to design a genuine diversity of settings: spaces for focus and for collaboration, for quiet and for noise, for retreat and for performance.
Designing for the full range
A well-designed learning environment, like a well-designed workplace, gives people control over where and how they work. That means acoustic refuges alongside active commons, and small-group nooks alongside large gathering spaces — a palette of choices rather than a single open floor.