1 Introduction A rich body of literature from various disciplines has demonstrated the impact of the workplace's physical environments on the perception, behavior, and performance of people at work. The literature examines the sociopsychological impact of spatial settings on individual reactions to work and to the work environment in particular depth. Table 1 summarizes the parameters of existing studies, which include workplace spatial param- eters, occupant experience, and outcomes, as well as job characteristics and relevant personality factors. Note that most of the spatial parameters studied in the literature were characteristics of individual workstations or workstation-scale measurements. The few variables in the literature that looked beyond workstation scale include workplace openness, visibility, and accessibility.Workplace openness refers to ``the ratio of total square footage of the office to the total length of its interior walls and partitions'' (Oldham and Rotchford, 1983, page 542). In a strict sense, it is not exactly a layout variable. For two workplaces with the same square footage, the one with fewer walls and partitions is considered to be more open. Defined this way, openness does not account for variance in the height of partitions; however, partitions of the same length and differing height do make quite a difference in the sense of `openness'. In some studies, the word `openness', as in visual openness, has been used interchangeably with visibility. Workplace collaborative space layout typology and occupant perception of collaboration environment Ying Hua Department of Design and Environmental Analysis, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA; e-mail: yh294@cornell.edu Vivian Loftness School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; e-mail: loftness@andrew.cmu.edu Robert Kraut Human^Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; e-mail: robert.kraut@cmu.edu Kevin M Powell Office of Applied Science, GSA Public Building Service, US General Services Administration, Washington, DC 20405, USA; e-mail: kevin.powell@gsa.gov Received 21 January 2008; in revised form 21 Jue 2009; published online 25 March 2010 Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2010, volume 37, pages 429 ^ 448 Abstract. The value of effective collaboration has become increasingly critical for organizational performance and agility. Along with technical and managerial strategies, the workspace spatial envi- ronment needs to be recognized and studied for its impact on collaboration and interactive behavior at work. Most spatial parameters studied in the workplace research literature are workstation-scale characteristics. However, these may not sufficiently describe the variety of shared spaces in which collaborative work and interactions take place. Based on a two-year multiple-site field study of workplace settings, this paper explores the space typology of a wide spectrum of formal and informal collaborative spaces, and it introduces a new set of layout-scale quantitative indices to describe the amount and distribution of collaborative spaces in a workplace. This research tested layout-scale spatial variables and compared them with workstation-scale variables in order to determine how well these variables predict the occupants' perception of the support from their workplace spatial environment for collaborative work and the distractions from others' interactive behavior in the work environment. The design implications of the findings are explored, and future research directions are identified. doi:10.1068/b35011