RE open space: some people hate it. We defiantly had some people struggle, and it isn’t always the one you would think. Some extroverts get too easily distracted, so introverts want to be left alone. Personally I love open offices and always absolutely hated having a private office. I worked super hard in my first corporate gig to “get that office” only to realize I hated it. This time around since I was building the team around me, I also built the office the way I liked it. It certainly took time for people to get used to having pin pong and xbox going in the background in addition to the open meeting space. Big monitors and noise cancelling headphones helped, as did a giant studio sound system that everyone could DJ to. Without the sound system on it sounded like a cacophony in there, but some music over the top smoothed a lot out. When I designed the other spaces for other teams they were different. Finance got cubes and offices, sales ops got a partially shielded desking model… in my experience no matter what 50% of the people will complain and 50% will be ok with it. The benefits of open office are defiantly not efficiency though. Some potential benefits are: seeing what everyone is doing (good for a creative director, maybe not for a designer), smaller footprint, less cost, visually looks good (if you can keep it decently neat, we had to put rules in place around that).
RE light: we had giant overhead tubes (it was previously a light industrial space) that we had switched out for daylight bulbs. When picking pentanes and reviewing samples this is important. A large bank of windows and an 18’ x 22’ roll up door (it was in SoCal, the door could be open almost all the time… which was great but had other draw backs like dust and pollen)… sometimes we shut off the overheads or shut off some of them and did desk lighting for people who preferred that.