John DeRiggi

Assignment 14

3/18/02




1. What was interesting about the article

The illustration of the author's point through the Chiat/Day example was most interesting. The description of the office setup sounded like a nice place to work. However it was interesting to find that the unstructured environment was more chaotic and confusing than useful and inspiring. I wonder if somethin like the Chiat/Day would work better in smaller settings or companies with a small number of employees and where there are not a lot of differing levels of status among those working in the same area. Maybe this would limit the turf war problem.


Not so interesting.

I thought a lot of this article was interesting. I guess a lot of people would not argue with the point that working from home limits you from the benefits of collaborating with co-workers.


The main message of the article

The main message of the article is that there are some serious benefits of working around other people, and despite all the claims that technology will allow us to spread out and still maintain a good level of productivity may be challenged.


People that I know that work from home.

At the company I work for there are a number of employees that do there work from home, or from their other place of employment. The problems that this creates in the company is that everyone in the company is working on their own project and people are limited as to what they can accomplish. Coordinating with another off-site worker is hard to do and most people only sign up for projects that they think they can finnish all by themselves. The learining process is much slower because people dont have easy access to the other more experienced members of the team.


Some new technologies that may help the situation

Microsofts netMeeting might helpe situations in which people need direct access to other members of a company. If all workers in the company, wether on or off-site were always connected through a conference room on net meeting, then everyone would have the ability to quickly ask questions to specific people.