Meeting and Collaboration Spaces
The relevance of informal meetings is rated highly among corporations which rely on fast information and knowledge exchange. All of the assessed corporate models take this into account and offer places for spontaneous communication and ad-hoc meetings of various sizes. These places range from small rooms such as the described Focus Spaces, which allow meetings of two to three persons, to Coffee Lounges. These can accommodate a variety of meetings, from two to three participants up to large groups of ten to fifteen persons.[1]
Apart from the size, meeting spaces vary in terms of look and feel. Different tasks and occasions need different settings, ranging from casual to formal, functional to creative, open to confidential, to name but a few. As illustrated in diagrams 4-23 and 4-24, most corporate models offer Focus Spaces, Meeting Points, Coffee Lounges and Project Rooms for informal meetings.
Spaces for collaborative tasks, either as ad-hoc or as planned long term projects, are features of all corporate models. Focus Spaces can accommodate short-term and ad-hoc collaboration in small groups. These rooms are not bookable, but since they are always in the vicinity of workspaces, they can be regarded as almost continuously available for collaborative tasks of small groups.
Some corporations offer dedicated project areas or Project Rooms which can be booked for prolonged periods of time of several weeks or even months. These can be distributed throughout the corporate site and assigned to individual departments on a permanent basis. In other models, they are pooled at a central place and temporarily assigned.
The majority of corporate workplace models offer spaces which are dedicated to crossdepartmental project work or spaces which can be temporarily used for project work.
- [1] Refer also to Figure 4-23 and Figure 4-24
