Common Workspace

You can build a CW out of crescent-shaped tables, designed to fit in corners. When you reverse 5 or 6 of them, they form a big ring. The inside of this ring is large enough to hold 3 or 4 cheap plastic shelves, for your servers.

When you turn 17-inch flat monitors sideways, you can fit four per table. This floor-plan shows you have enough room for their (invisible) feet:

I would configure the keyboards and mice to either collaborate, with 1 CPU on 4 monitors, or "co-program", with 2 CPUs on 2 monitors each.

Add the sixth table only after you finish tinkering with the wires in the hub.

For extra credit, figure out how you can drag any window into any monitor, all the way around the ring...


The question is why would you want to do this? What purpose does it serve beyond being an ultra-cool gimmick?

In the current design, you've got a false impression of a simple continuous topology since collaboration requires users at opposite sides of the ring to collaborate. Which they'll do by replicating screen areas across the ring. Which makes the screens' logical topology extremely complex and discontinuous.

It would be more useful to have the design inverted, with the people inside and the screens outside. That way, at least it would be possible for everyone to see all of the screens.

A ring of desks is already well-established among coaching firms like IndustrialLogic. I drew the above because I discovered an available cache of 6 curved desks, which would fit together perfectly like that. A loop of rectangular desks is a feeble attempt at the real thing.

And folks put the monitors in a loop, facing out, to free the walls around the space for whiteboards.


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