If you work in an office with out this level of protection and have psychiatric episodes such as panic attacks visit the Panic Attacks page at VisionAndPsychosis.Net.

The phenomenon produces a variety of symptoms including depression. There are pages of events going back over a hundred years to support this.

Only once I’ve experienced something remotely like it; I was working with 3 colleagues in one room, and at some point someone in charge of things decided we would work better with a 5 feet wall in the middle, seating us two by two. Still opposite of each other, but facing the wall instead of our colleagues. I hated it.

Alex: Totally agreed. The old Santa Monica office (now Google) put me too close to sales folks who were constantly on the phone. I used to get in early to have quiet time, but that only works for development.

But other poor souls have it even worse, having to sit next to some kind of secretarial or legal team, who have much more to chat about.

Here in the UK it’s pretty much all open plan, everywhere. In the customer office I’m in this week the entire (Agile) team sits in an open plan area and there are conference rooms at each end, of differing sizes, that can be used when privacy is needed (or wanted).

In the Oracle offices it’s pretty much the same, most areas are open plan, but some of the senior management gets their own office… a lot of the desking is hot desked too, so there’s not a huge amount of “this is my space, this is yours” over here… although messing with the resourcers would be a REALLY bad idea!

oh on topic again, I sadly suspect that Puneet is correct in imagining that corporates look at the culture of other corporates, more successful - more rich - more innovative whatever it is, and decide that they can use seating plan changes to drive culture changes. I don’t believe so, it seems to me that culture change is driven both top down - overtly - and by core groups of internal staff covertly (or at least tacitly). But it’s a human activity, not a logistical activity.