One Man's Notes

Khoi Vinh:

Google Classroom’s lackluster design is actually perfectly in line with the way we’ve always thought about the spaces we build for learning. Schools have by and large been conspicuously if not chronically underfunded, especially in comparison to spaces for work.

The last two months have proven that:

1. There is lots of potential in online learning
2. Most of the tools are, frankly, pretty poor

I hope Benedict Evans is right when he suggests that we are likely to see an explsion of startups in this space in the coming months.

Rory Sutherland:

I was influenced in this by the work of Nassim Taleb, who argues that a high degree of variation may be better than monotonous pursuit of a supposedly optimal average. This led me to think it might be better to partition work into periods of high sociability interspersed with days of self--seclusion, as an alternative to the neither-fish-nor-fowl halfway-house of the open-plan office.

I think this would both address some of the problems with offices during this pandemic period, and quite possibly lead to a more productive information worker workforce.

There’s a lot of pre-existing work on more variable workplace structures, most of which has been soundly ignored for decades. To give some context, I was writing about some of these issues for Estates Gazette 20-odd years ago. But everything remained trapped in the homogenous open-plan office approach.

There’s some real work do be done here around new ways of working, and new ways to use office space.