How should you seat groups of people?
It depends on what activity you want to encourage. If you want people to visit, share ideas, bond and create agreement, put them in “social seating.” This spacing actually brings people together, like team style seating in a classroom or the dining table in most homes. The people are facing each other around a table but the table breadth is no more than three feet, so they are still in personal distance.
If you want them to be quiet, be obedient and listen, use sociofugal seating. This creates spacing which separates people so no one faces anyone else. We see this in the straight rows of chairs found in airports or bus terminals.
Positions at a table also communicate power. In Western cultures, a father traditionally sits at the head of the table facing the other members of the family, appropriate to his primary role in patriarchal societies.
