A team is born from trust, goals and leadership. Space is one of the concrete levers that keep it together: proximity by design – who sits near whom, where informal exchanges arise, how many and which spaces for exchange exist – is material that a space planning project acts on directly.
The lever of space in teamwork
Trust, shared goals and leadership are matters of management and organisational culture. Our field is space – and space affects teamwork in a measurable way. Unplanned interactions between people on the same team depend on how easy it is to meet: paths that cross, adjacent break areas, workstations that allow a quick exchange without booking a room. When these elements are missing, collaboration becomes formal, slowed down, mediated by meetings that could be two-minute conversations.
Proximity: how it is designed
Proximity is not a side effect of the layout: it is designed. The first step is understanding which teams work together, how often and in what way. Through interviews and surveys we reconstruct the "typical day" of each group – how much time they spend at the desk, how much in meetings, how much in informal collaboration, how much in activities that require focus – and we bring out the expressed and latent needs, the ones nobody states but that space must support anyway. From this data we draw the adjacencies: who needs to be near whom, where to place the areas for quick exchange, and where instead to protect individual focus.
The right mix: collaboration and focus
An office that is all open space tears down physical barriers but can make individual work impossible. An office that is all enclosed protects focus but isolates teams. The right mix depends on real data: how many hours a day a person needs silence, how many need exchange, how many need to be on calls. Measuring the desk sharing ratio and mapping activities by team provide concrete numbers on which to size collaboration work settings and focus areas in the correct proportion. The result is a space in which teamwork becomes easier without sacrificing individual productivity.