A group of researchers at MIT found that the right level of crowdedness led to more chance encounters and more frequent communication across disciplinary boundaries.

It has become axiomatic among architects and interior designers that spaces in all categories of buildings should enable and facilitate human interaction. This is especially true in academia, where spontaneous and unplanned “collisions” are thought to increase engagement, especially among people within different educational disciplines.

A new study by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology adds some empirical evidence to support this previously anecdotal design paradigm. The study, entitled “Spatial structure of workplace and communication between colleagues: A study of E-mail exchange and spatial relatedness on the MIT campus,” looked at email traffic among faculty, researchers and staff and found, among other things, the following: