I was talking to a University Professor recently who was seeking ways to ensure that his super-smart but notoriously uncommunicative students would interact and generate more creative research.
Today’s invention is a way to promote that.
Students (or other creative types) would each have a cubicle as usual but these would actually be mobile boxes, capable of being loosely hitched together for a few days and then decoupled and moved around the office space (perhaps being motorised).
‘Collisions’ between cubes, determined either by management or by semi-random automatic movements, would ensure that much more interaction between workers occurs. When joined, there would be only one entry/exit to each pair. Groupings of greater numbers of people (using hexagonal cubicles eg) would also create a ‘cool’ environment in which people could sense that collaboration was a requirement.
Cubes could also be rotated, to shake up people’s perspectives, whilst preserving their own little territories.
For groups not wanting to invest in all this mechanisiation, it would be possible to have fixed cubes with a maze running in the spaces between them that could be varied, forcing people to take new routes between their colleagues.
