Does a room designed for networking beat a room designed for hedonism?
Conditions are published figures or derived from them. Output is measured from a standard run — 1,200 people, 4 hours, fixed seed, identical for both rooms. A highlighted cell is only marked where “more” is actually better; density and volume are conditions, not scores.
These are the two rooms on this site whose explicit purpose is getting people to meet, and they attack it from opposite directions. A conference floor is sparse — 0.45 people per square metre, the only room here at Fruin grade C — and quiet at 72 dB. A nightclub is four times denser and 28 dB louder.
The conference generates less raw contact: 12.0 encounters per person per hour against 17.6. It ends with a connected group of 435 people against the nightclub's 213. Fewer collisions, roughly twice the network.
A conference has the longest speech range of any room modelled — 3.24 metres, essentially the full social zone — so a conversation can form across a gap between two people who chose each other, rather than between whoever happens to be pressed together. Sparse rooms let people select. Dense rooms assign.
