Susan Cain in an opinion piece, “The Rise of the New Groupthink,” written for the New York Times, argues that the focus on collaboration, teamwork and cooperation in today’s workplace has put so much emphasis on people working together, that the offices have ceased to address the needs of introverts- which comprise half of our society.

She contends that workplaces operate on a set of work habits and principles that are most conducive to extroverts and, therefore, urges organizations to think it through the lens of personality types: introverts, extroverts and situational extroverts/introverts. To accentuate her point further, Cain quotes Steve Wozniak’s advice to aspiring inventors, “[m]ost inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone-”I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.” In short, Cain views solitude as imperative to success and defines ideal workplaces as spaces that offer both casual group interactions as well as pockets of solitude when required.
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The models based on the concept of “biophilia,” also use human as the basic principal for devising the most productive workplace. They differ from Cain’s approach in that the focus of these models is not the personality types but the well-being of humans. Biologist Stephen Boyden, in an article on the biological foundations of well-being, proposes a list of well-being needs that are intrinsic to a “human’s sense of fulfilment, quality of life, and psychological health.” A subset from the list stands out especially due to its relative relevance in creating a more holistic workplace design. The subset most relevant to workplace design includes, “social milieu, freedom for solitary and group working, opportunities to develop self-expression, an interesting visual scene, acceptable acoustic conditions, contrast and random changes for the sense to react to and opportunities to exercise or switch over from work to other stimulating activities.” The proponents of the “biophilia” models have looked to biology to find the answer to how design, productivity and well-being are linked and whether, if at all, these findings can be translated into the realm of designing for humans.

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