Well, here we are. Laundry night and nothing to write about. It was a quiet day at work. The girls are working hard on their final projects. I was failing miserably at getting even the “Quickstart” example code running in a project I’m working on while the girls are busy. I did help solve some programming problems they were having, so I wasn’t completely useless. (Update 10 am Week 6, Day 4 I got the quickstart to work!!!)

Still, here we are. No bike ride tonight because I had early yoga this morning. There is one last hope. Let’s see.

Good news! Not all is lost! I was thinking that I hadn’t posted more than a picture or two recently, and I was hoping to be able to dig something up.

I’ve been thinking a lot about workspaces this summer. Our class has had the privilege of visiting several high tech work environments. Each has it’s own character, as you will see. I have been meaning to take some pictures of other office spaces on the floor where I work, but haven’t gotten around to it. Spaces like these could be useful in an educational setting (not that I ever think about that, it’s summer you know).

As far as fun tech spaces go, it’s hard to beat Groupon. A quick glance at some of the signs hanging around the office makes that clear.

Each of the different areas of the office has a different theme. These are a few shots from the Las Vegas area, complete with umbrella tables and lounge chairs. Employees use both. We saw some eating lunch at an indoor umbrella table.

I don’t have a picture of it, but most employees work at long desks. There are no cubicles. Any separation of work space is accomplished through personal items (small awards, water bottles, etc.) and monitor placement. Each person has about six feet of space. This is a very common pattern – I’ve seen  at several companies. At Groupon, each desk was labeled with a tall stick or flagpole (about three feet high) with the person’s nameplate on it. The nameplates were not fancy – paper or cardstock. They were at least in part colored by what department the person worked in. I remember that HR used rainbows. Departments weren’t all together. Usually people from several different departments were nearby each other.

At Groupon there were a few circular workspaces with a team of three or four people working in them. These seemed to be the most high tech people – many of them had three or more monitors at their desks.

In terms of where to store personal items, the answer is lockers – again, a very common pattern. The lockers don’t seem to be assigned. These were adorned with fanciful stickers to help you remember which you are using.

I think I mentioned before that the conference rooms (all of these places have lots of collaboration spaces of different sizes) have humorous names selected by popular vote of the employees. The Star Trek Wars room is actually a meditation room.

They also had an Enchanted Forest area, complete with a giant hollowed out conference log, and a tree with swings hanging off it.

The piece-de-resistance was in the front lobby of Groupon. It is the giant cat in a spaceship, pictured here with the back of Courtney and the front of Shanzeh, our TAs.

I have a few other things to do before I hit the hay tonight, so I’ll stop there. That’ll give me chance to take some pictures at Accenture. You’ll see that the culture is different there, but they have a number of very interesting workspaces.