engineered serendipity - does your space enable casual collisions?

This 2012 draft post was in line with thinking at the time. Now that I'm finally posting it in 2022 when we have remote work, it's not clear how much of this physical proximity theory actually was true, and how much was justification for particular office designs and management preferences.

Mr. Kelly was convinced that physical proximity was everything; phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Quite intentionally, Bell Labs housed thinkers and doers under one roof. Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing. Like an able concert hall conductor, he sought a harmony, and sometimes a tension, between scientific disciplines; between researchers and developers; and between soloists and groups.

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.

New York Times Sunday Review - True Innovation - February 25, 2012

Do any other organisations engineer serendipity in this way?  Google does

The person responsible for all the wonky integration started the New York office with 17 people.  She says she's incorporated the influx of new staffers with an eye towards what she calls casual collision, where Google staffers bump into people they don't normally work with.

Wall Street Journal - Tech: Andy Jordan (video) - quote from 3:37 to 3:51

via NYC Digital which also links to the WSJ article: Google Web Grows in City (Feb 29, 2012).

This kind of thinking applies to both offline and online spaces.