You've probably read about how the open workplace trend has run its course. Many articles questioned the effectiveness of open workplaces, and Susan Cain's book Quiet argued that in many corners of western society, extroversion has been fetishized at the expense of more solitary modes of working and learning.

There are two huge flaws with the claim that the open workspace is bad.

Flaw #1
The claims are almost always based on individuals' opinions about individual work. More important for an organization is the output of teams, departments and the organization itself, and unless the whole is no more than the sum of parts in your organization, individual opinions about individual work doesn't add up the entire story. A study of computer-enabled collaboration showed in the '90s that working interactively can at times be maddening compared to solitary work, but can still collectively produce more and better outputs - sometimes to the surprise of individuals involved. 

Individual opinions about individual work are also a problem, where they tend to focus on immediate issues like noise, while discounting indirect problems - when people were asked to track time losses, challenges associated with interaction tended on average to be more significant than those associated with distractions.

People in relatively open environments also tended to have dramatically better interaction patterns than those in relatively enclosed workplaces, while those in relatively enclosed environments had only modestly fewer distractions.

Flaw #2
Recent criticisms about open workplaces is the underlying idea that there is only one choice: open or enclosed. Research done by CannonDesign with 14 organizations over the past year has shown that the average employee wants fewer distractions, but they also wanted 35% more frequent interactions within their teams. In other words, they want more energy and buzz in the workplace, but want the flexibility to escape to a quiet place from time to time. So what they really don't want is one space that's just open or completely enclosed.

However, workplaces can be all combinations of open and enclosed. How spaces are clustered and how people are enabled to work across a variety of different spaces are two other dimensions that can radically affect how people work. Group spaces can be optimized to enhance productive distractions, while minimizing pointless ones, and individuals can be given a bunch of spaces to choose from at any point rather than be limited to just one.

So it's not a question of whether the open workplace is over. It's really about how your organization works, how individuals and teams need to work, and how the full complexity of an organization can be supported by a multi-dimensional workplace that can be used in different ways over time.