I read something once—I don’t remember where or what it was called—about how to design good buildings where people can get really good work done, and it heavily emphasized the importance of chance encounters: people need to be able to talk to each other, so they can sow the seeds of collaboration and so forth, in a way that’s as low cost as possible, and also shuffles people around in an interesting way. It’s much smoother for us to start collaborating by running into each other in the hallway and asking each other what we’ve been up to than for me to have to sit down and figure out who I want to talk to, then finding them in person (let alone emailing them to set up a time to meet—what a nightmare).
Later I read another thing that emphasized the importance of repeated chance encounters for naturally building friendships. My model is something like, if you know you’re going to randomly run into this person over and over again, you can’t just be neutral towards them: your social machinery has to decide whether the equilibrium in your iterated PD is going to be mostly cooperation or mostly defection.
Some corollaries: living alone is terrible, working remotely is terrible unless your coworkers are terrible, third places where you can run into people you like or will like randomly are incredibly important.
I don’t know if this is what you read, but this reminds me of Bell Labs:
ONE element of his approach was architectural. He personally helped design a building in Murray Hill, N.J., opened in 1941, where everyone would interact with one another. Some of the hallways in the building were designed to be so long that to look down their length was to see the end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.
I read something once—I don’t remember where or what it was called—about how to design good buildings where people can get really good work done, and it heavily emphasized the importance of chance encounters: people need to be able to talk to each other, so they can sow the seeds of collaboration and so forth, in a way that’s as low cost as possible, and also shuffles people around in an interesting way. It’s much smoother for us to start collaborating by running into each other in the hallway and asking each other what we’ve been up to than for me to have to sit down and figure out who I want to talk to, then finding them in person (let alone emailing them to set up a time to meet—what a nightmare).
Later I read another thing that emphasized the importance of repeated chance encounters for naturally building friendships. My model is something like, if you know you’re going to randomly run into this person over and over again, you can’t just be neutral towards them: your social machinery has to decide whether the equilibrium in your iterated PD is going to be mostly cooperation or mostly defection.
Some corollaries: living alone is terrible, working remotely is terrible unless your coworkers are terrible, third places where you can run into people you like or will like randomly are incredibly important.
I don’t know if this is what you read, but this reminds me of Bell Labs:
― New York Times
The thing I read was either about Bell Labs, Google, Pixar, or a lab at MIT. I may have seen multiple articles make this point.