What makes a “great place”?

I’m thinking directly for how to research and creativity. Like what about a place helps make people think new thoughts?

Some personal inspirations here are when Steve Jobs designed Pixar, he made it so that everyone had to go to the central hub. You would naturally meet people that were in all different classes and walks of life. Another big inspiration here is MIT’s Building 20 during WWII. Part of what made it great was that it was so scrappy, researchers could just do things (like poke holes in the walls), and there was so much diversity between fields.

Why is it that we feel a need to keep people from different disciplines in entirely different buildings? Why isn’t it that everyone is mixed together and you almost have to interact with someone with different views than you. If that’s a prime mover for creativity, then this seems like a no-brainer.

Can we build some modern incantation of this? I think that Edge Esmeralda 2025 is trying to be a modern manifestation, but I think this could be taken much further. Obviously, they have to keep it profitable and what not, but I think there are some really amazing people at Edge that make it what it is and are the core of how it could be the new Building 20. It’s also perhaps too spread out and too easy for people to so quickly segment. How do you force people, almost like at Pixar, to occupy the same space with one another? It should be impossible for you to not interact with people from different tracks as you.