> Google is also trying to end the fight over the office temperature. This system allows every seat to have its own air diffuser to control the direction or amount of air blowing on them.
That just shows how clueless they are. There will always be somebody that will be unhappy somebodys cold air spills over their desk. Air temperature difference in openspace necessarily generates drafts which inevitably irritate some people.
There is a simple existing solution and it is to remove any control over temperature in the office from employees and set it to one predictable setting.
For the past two decades I worked in two dozen offices and every single time I worked in an office with controls in the rooms there were always some people fighting over temperature setting.
But whenever there is no setting available to employees everybody just adjusts and puts on clothes that are suitable to predictable temperature you know you will find when you arrive at the office.
It is my observation that people are clueless about office temperature and given choice will set temperature lower in the summer than in the winter! Which doesn't make any sense, because one part of the discomfort is the temperature difference between outside an inside. It just doesn't make any sense to be cold in the office in summer and hot in winter.
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I have once arrived at a rather large open space in summer where somebody increased temperature on one side over the weekend. That was presumably because the rest of the office was fricking freezing but the person was too lazy to set the temperature for entire office.
When I came in I thought there was a lot of noise and a small tornado as one side of the office was trying to heat up the air while other was trying to cool it down.
When different parts of a large open space have different temperature it means that the AC will be doing overtime trying to cool the air in some parts and heat it up in other parts.