This paper reports on research in workplace issues encountered by knowledge workers in cubicle environments, and on BlueSpace, a prototype workspace with the goal of addressing workers' critical needs for privacy, concentration and personalization. To inform the design process, more than fifty on-site interviews with knowledge workers were conducted at six companies ranging from dot.com startups to Fortune 100 corporations. Several common requirements emerged including the need for a sense of control of one's workspace, the ability to create privacy on-demand to improve concentration and minimize unwanted interruptions, as well as in-place support for dyadic interactions. Many other common workplace complaints (e.g., too hot, too cold, too noisy) were found to be derivative of the major requirements for individual control and privacy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.