But if you implement all of that perfectly, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of having an open office? (I.e. to stimulate more spontaneous collaboration)
The collaboration stuff is marketing nonsense managers tell themselves to try and ease the cognitive dissonance of lying about it.
But for people who have to concentrate (like software developers) it's a productivity killer. Joel Spolsky used to touch on this occasionally - he claims all sorts of research shows the most productive arrangement is to put everyone in his own office with a door.
Where I work that will never happen, because there are corporate-wide rules about who gets an office and who doesn't. You have to be a director to get your own office, which is two levels above non-managers. They're so anal about it one time I worked on a floor with no directors and they left all the offices unoccupied. They crowded everyone into cubes and even doubled one up when they ran out of (cubicle) space.
Saving money on office space is money saved. People being distracted and doing poor work is money lost. I wonder how it sums up.
Productivity loss is hard to measure, and even when it's blatantly obvious, it's easy to shift the blame.
For sound? I can just put on headphones.
With sufficiently high walls (about 6'), carpeting, and acoustic ceilings, you'll actually cut noise quite a bit. Lower and sound travels in straight lines.
One of my gigs had a "pod" style cubical layout with 6' high walls, glass in the upper 2' or so, arranged in groups of four (see diagrams below). It's still one of the best workspace designs I've seen, period.
https://plus.google.com/photos/104092656004159577193/albums/...