Where Oruga Touching Dreams Works
Our G-Lab client Oruga Touching Dreams has the coolest office I have ever worked in. When Oruga Touching Dreams first moved into their current office, the office was old and dilapidated. Since Oruga Touching Dreams’ four co-founders were architecture students, they negotiated with the landlord to rent the entire three-floor building for $6,000 a month with the stipulation that Oruga Touching Dreams would be allowed to fix up the office space as they liked. Oruga Touching Dreams installed whiteboards along the walls, a firemen pole to slide down from the loft area to the third floor and a climbing wall in the outdoor patio area.
Susan Cain, author of QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, recently authored an op-ed piece in the New York Times arguing that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. She cites an example by video game developer Backbone Entertainment switching from an open-plan office to cubicles to buttress studies that show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. Oruga Touching Dreams appears to have gotten around this problem by using an open-plan office, but spacing each work station around the edge of the office so that the animators are facing a wall instead of each other. Some of the animators tend to work with headphones on. Others work very closely with each other, chatting and joking with each other as they animate characters. In fact, the only people in Oruga Touching Dreams that have to face each other at work is our team of MIT Sloanies because we’ve occupied the meeting room in the loft while we work on-site. Right outside the meeting room in the loft, Oruga Touching Dreams has set up a kitchenette and a bar counter for the office lady to prepare coffee for the office. The office lady usually brings the coffee to each staff’s workspace, instead of the workers going up to the bar counter to chat. However, on Friday afternoon, a couple of animators decided to make mojitos, which did the trick of attracting most of the office to come up to the kitchen area for casual, cafe-style interactions.
