Thinking out loud

On introversion, open-floorplan offices, and a few of the things we ought to consider when designing systems for people

The classic dichotomy between introverts and extroverts is familiar enough: Introverts need to recharge, mentally and emotionally, after time engaging with other people, while extroverts need that engagement in order to feel recharged. It explains a lot about people, but it's also often misidentified with other characteristics.

■ Perhaps the most common example is internal versus external processing. Some people manage all of their thoughts quite comfortably inside the space of their own heads. Others need to project their thinking into the physical environment around them, whether by talking to themselves, jotting notes on paper, piling books and magazines in particular places, or otherwise putting their thoughts into space.

■ The introvert who is a strongly expressed external processor could easily be mistaken for an extrovert, but some people simply need to talk in order to think. It's not a matter of whether anyone else is around to hear, but whether the thoughts travel outside the brain before being fully digested. Someone who talks your ear off but doesn't take the cues signaling your lack of interest? That's an introvert who needs to process externally; they might as well be talking to a cat or a tree. A true extrovert thrives on interaction and feedback.

■ Likewise, the extrovert who processes internally might look like a wallflower. But the libraries and coffee shops of the world are full of them, and they're reliable guests at every party. They may exhibit the old stereotype that "still waters run deep", but they can't abide loneliness -- they might not spill their every thought for others to pick up, but a nod, a smile, or a passing "hello" is like fuel for the tank.

■ Couple these characteristics with others, and it soon becomes evident how humans can be richly varied, even within a family. A meticulous extrovert who processes internally might have the most spotless desk in the open-floorplan office and leave work buzzing with energy.

■ But put an external processor in the same office, and the very act of having to hot-desk might drive them mad -- even if they're chronically extroverted. An external processor may need to organize their thoughts in the physical space around them, with things like papers, Post-It notes, sketches, or plan drawings. And if that space is first-come, first-served, they might never get a major long-term project done.

■ Meanwhile, they'll quite possibly drive that meticulous internal processor right up and down the wall. The conflict is nobody's fault, at least not intentionally, and yet the circumstances create an almost inevitable conclusion.

■ It's funny just how many decisions -- from how we're grouped in elementary school, to how workplaces are organized, to who has a social "pass" to judge others -- come down to personality characteristics over which we really have no control, and about which we often haven't really ever been formally educated. Accounting for those features would make lots of our human-built world run more smoothly.