Space is not a neutral container. It shapes the behaviours of the people who inhabit it: it determines who meets whom, what is easy to do and what takes extra effort. Designing space means, in essence, deciding which behaviours to enable.
The mechanism: presence or absence of a place
The presence or absence of a place for a given activity determines how often it actually happens. If there is no adequate space to make a private call, the calls happen anyway – in the corridor, in the open space, in some random corner – but in conditions that worsen the outcome for the speaker and disturb the people working around them. Space does not prevent behaviours: it makes them easy or difficult. And that difference – between what takes zero effort and what forces people to find workarounds – determines what really happens in the organisation every day.
Maximum occupancy: anyone looking for a private place to make a call does not find one. Only three reach a room, the rest are left without.
Proximity as a design lever
Space also acts through physical proximity. Teams that work close together meet more often, share information informally, develop a mutual understanding that does not come from meetings. Teams that are physically separated – even in the same building – tend to communicate less and to develop their own self-contained logics. This holds for fixed work areas, but it holds even more for the places of unplanned encounter: transit zones, points of convergence, the in-between spaces that a superficial project leaves empty. Designed with intent, they become the places where cohesion is built.
Community Based Design layout: proximity areas and points of convergence next to the workstations. Every user reaches the right work setting.
Designing to enable: the method
The starting point is always an analysis of the desired behaviours: which activities need to happen, how often, and between which people. Through interviews and surveys we reconstruct the teams' typical day and bring out both the stated and the latent needs – those that are never voiced but that the space still has to make possible. From that map the layout choices emerge: which areas to devote to concentration, where to place the collaborative work settings, how to position the support areas so they are actually used. The resulting space is not a catalogue of functions: it is the physical translation of how that specific organisation works best.