By the time I'd started my professional career in the mid-1990s, open plan offices were becoming common. Under the guise of promoting better collaboration and interaction between colleagues, and with the financial motivation of packing more people into the available office space, we have seen that move to the more impersonal hot-desking movement. But while the idea that removing the walls in our offices can only help us collaborate and communicate more, a new study finds that the opposite is the case.

In her new book The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids, architecture critic Alexandra Lange explains that since the dawn of the mass-produced toy industry, there have been Good Toys and Bad Toys in the eyes of adults.

"The Bad Toy is one that just sits there, to be mashed and pulled in a set sequence, and is ruined once it falls apart," she writes. "The Good Toy lets children stitch their own world back together, using the simplest of physical parts to conjure cities of imagination."

Few things instill more fear when I think of network architecture and security than thousands of tiny devices collecting and sending data across a network. The Internet of Things is a rising tide that will mean there will be between five and ten devices connected to the Internet for every many, woman and child on the planet before the decade is out. A recent experiment sought to discover whether a serverless architecture was worth exploring when deploying an IoT solution.

So, you've been coerced into what seems like another no-win parenting scenario: It's LEGO time, and your aspiring Frank Lloyd Wright doesn't want your help in building an amphibious rainbow tank with 16 axles (plus wings). Even still, he's insisting on your participation because his genius must be witnessed (the brilliant ones are always so demanding).