Malcolm Crawford (a long-time Apple colleague, recently retired), with a terrific piece on the structural design failure of Apple Park:

Apple Park’s primary design goal was to foster collaboration and serendipitous interaction — almost the exact words Apple’s own head of industrial design used to describe the building years after it opened, and consistent with what Jobs pitched to Cupertino’s city council in 2011: a ring shape chosen specifically to eliminate hierarchical corners in favour of more egalitarian, encounter-friendly circulation. By most accounts from the people who actually work there, it’s failed at exactly that.

The open-plan floors make it hard to concentrate. The building is so large that getting from one meeting to the next eats real time out of the day. It’s common for people to run meetings with colleagues over Webex — colleagues on the same campus, sometimes no more than two hundred yards away.

Ironically, Apple Park replaced a campus that did far better on the same measure without ever trying to. Infinite Loop produced far more of the accidental, cross-team contact Apple Park was explicitly built to create. Working out why starts with what Infinite Loop got right by accident. It continues with what the research on office proximity says about why that kind of thing happens at all. And it ends with what Apple Park could become instead — including a version of the fix Apple already trusts enough to run for a hundred people a year.

Apple Park is a beautiful structure, but is not terribly conducive to focused or collaborative work. Even as an occasional visitor I found it overwhelming. Employees sit shoulder to shoulder, voices bounce off and bleed through glass walls, and privacy is a virtual impossibility. My friends and colleagues who worked there regularly found it difficult to be productive.

I worked in Infinite Loop (Building 3, 2nd floor) for thirteen years (right below Developer Publications, where Malcolm spent a good portion of his Apple career). I loved IL because its design made serendipitous encounters easy. Whether it was sitting outside Caffè Macs or in the IL 1 Atrium, I would inevitably bump into someone and have a conversation that furthered an in-flight project, sparked something new, or simply reinforced the social ties that bind colleagues.

It helped that at that time, Apple had perhaps 10,000 employees, most of whom were in or near IL. After iPhone came about and IL started getting locked down, much of the natural collaboration dissipated, disappearing behind badged doors and disclosures. By the time Apple Park came along, “chance encounters” had already become less frequent, and when they happened, those conversations were necessarily constrained by NDAs. Apple Park was a vision for an Apple that, ten years after iPhone, no longer really existed.

Malcolm’s essay captures the collaborative beauty of IL and the challenges of Apple Park, and offers a solution that I find remarkably appealing.

If you’ve been part of the Apple (or NeXT) developer ecosystem for a while, you may remember Malcolm—mmalc—as a long-time technical writer on Apple’s Developer Publications team. He’s now writing publicly at mmalc X Machina on topics that stem “from a lifelong interest in technology and the environment.” So far he’s covered everything from EV charger infrastructure to crop yield to a conceptual introduction to git. He notes that he’s “not inviting anyone to sign up or become a ‘member’” but I signed up anyway. Or follow him on Mastodon.