IA has designed several spaces like this in offices across the city, from a quiet, comfortable library at Sonos’ downtown office to a contemplation room at the Seaport’s Red Hat. “To bring innovation to the next level, you have to bring people together to share ideas, but then they need that quiet time to go focus and think and contemplate and reflect,” says Reetika Vijay, managing principal at workplace and retail designers IA Interior Architects. Without sacrificing the look, convenience, and economics of the open floor plan, companies are now devising intentional nooks and crannies in their office spaces-either built into the architecture or brought in later-where workers can get away from the group and take a moment to themselves. Open offices sure look a lot cooler than cubicle farms, but they’re also loud and distracting, and have been proven to actually decrease face-to-face interactions among co-workers. Over a decade after the fully- or semi- open floor plan trend tore down walls and democratized desks in offices everywhere, we’ve learned a thing or two. In many offices across the city, this option is available to workers on the daily. ROOM, a New York-based startup, brought a model of their booth to Boston last week to show prospective users (they’re already in use at Hubspot and Wayfair’s local offices), and in a move that should surprise no one who knows me, I leapt at the chance to sit in total isolation within an enclosed soundproof space for 30 minutes. How, then, was I able to be A-OK with the call I made last week? Because I didn’t make it while surrounded by my colleagues at my conspicuous desk at the top of the stairs-I made it from within a ROOM phone booth, an 80 x 37 x 38-inch soundproof pod meant to offer a quiet place to take a call inside a bustling, open workspace. It’s a problem that’s exacerbated by the Boston magazine office’s semi-open floor plan-separated from my coworkers by only chest-high desk partitions, I adapt a self-conscious, slumped-over posture whenever I must make a call at my desk, trying to ignore the conversation happening six feet away from me, the typing sounds bouncing off the walls, the inexplicable faint music coming from downstairs, and, most of all, the anxiety-inducing thought that everyone around me can hear my every word. However, I am also an introvert and-while my editors, unlike my most terrifying college professors, don’t cold call me in meetings, and my coworkers, unlike my childhood Girl Scout troop, don’t make up games in which they try to get me to talk to them-this personality trait of mine is often at odds with the demands of my chosen profession. I am a writer who makes and receives phone calls every day. I realize that this achievement may sound rather trivial to most, but for me, this is a very important victory. Readers, I have some exciting news: Last week, I made a phone call on a Wednesday between the hours of 9 a.m. Phone booth photo courtesy of ROOM/Galaxy via Getty Images
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