Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Getting the Conversation Rolling
Sherry Turkle is certainly not the first person to lament the fact that people just don’t have conversations the way they used to – in words, face-to-face, and about topics that matter. Her recent book on this topic, “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age”, is attracting a great deal of attention, however, and will surely lead to lots of designer-client discussions. To make her point regarding the importance of workplace conversations – and Turkle does in the course of her book address talking in other places – she reports on Waber’s work, which determined that: “face-to-face conversation leads to higher productivity and is also associated with reduced stress. Call centers are more productive when people take breaks together; software teams produce programs with fewer bugs when they talk more. And Waber’s studies had disappointing news for those who equate email and talk: The ‘conversation effect’ doesn’t …
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