The conflation of physical grouping and intellectual cooperation is one of the stupidest, and personally most annoying, that I encounter.
I collaborate just fine, and I did so best with a team dispersed across the country and, to some extent, the world -- some of whom I never met in person. We were professional, cooperative, helpful to each other and to external contacts. Instead of a bunch of "physical interaction", we put are heads down and created. When we needed to interact, we did so readily -- across a spectrum from emails to IM to phone calls. People were, meetings excepted, immediately reachable and responsive.
When we needed to concentrate... we were NOT distracting by 15 different things going on in our peripheral vision and hearing, dragging us down to the attention level of the lowest common denominator. This held AS WELL for our group interactions, where we could focus on each other, and where a grouping did not invite the attention and interruption of outside parties.
That's what I find an indiscriminately open space and "collaborative" workplace to be: A race to the bottom.
(Note that, as a company or organization grows, that's what open space inevitably becomes -- indiscriminate. Even if it works initially for a small, focused group, it doesn't scale.)
