May 12, 2026
In 1986, Steve Jobs was going through one of the most difficult periods of his career. He had just been pushed out of Apple, the company he had co-founded, following a power struggle with the board of directors. It was during that transitional period, before his return to Apple, that he purchased the computer graphics division of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm for several million dollars, renamed it Pixar, and found himself leading a group of engineers and visionary artists who were reinventing animation from scratch.
Years later, as Pixar’s films were reshaping Hollywood, Jobs faced a problem that no spreadsheet could solve: animators, software engineers, and screenwriters worked side by side but rarely spoke to each other in any meaningful way. Three distinct professional cultures, each with its own language, rhythm, and habits. The films Pixar wanted to make depended on the intersection of these cultures; and yet that intersection kept failing to happen.
Jobs could have written a policy. He could have organized collaboration workshops, defined processes, appointed a manager to oversee cross-team communication. He did one thing: he designed a building.
The new Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, now known as the Steve Jobs Building, was built around a deceptively simple idea: make it impossible not to run into someone. Bathrooms, the cafeteria, meeting rooms, and the reception area were all concentrated in a single central atrium. Anyone moving from one part of the building to another had to pass through that space. They’d see someone. Exchange a few words. Sometimes something more would come of it.
“If a building doesn’t encourage collaboration, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium.”
— Steve Jobs
Collaboration, Jobs had come to understand, cannot be mandated. It has to be designed.
Urban planners have known this for decades. Jan Gehl, the Danish architect and urbanist, spent his career documenting how the quality of physical spaces shapes the quality of human interactions. His research leads to a conclusion that feels obvious only in hindsight: the public spaces that work are not necessarily the grandest or the most beautiful. They are the ones where people find themselves sharing a space while already doing something else, walking, sitting, waiting.
Space is never neutral, even when it appears to be. Every design decision, where you place a bench, how you orient an entrance, where you position a fountain, is in fact a decision about who will encounter whom, how often, and in what frame of mind. It is a choice that takes effect before anyone sets foot in the environment.
Don Norman, one of the founders of cognitive design, calls this mechanism affordance. Every object, every environment, every interface implicitly communicates which behaviors it enables and which it discourages, without the need for instructions. A door with a handle says pull. A door with a horizontal bar says push. The message lands before conscious thought kicks in.
Digital platforms work in exactly the same way, with one important difference: digital affordances are invisible. And precisely because they are invisible, they are harder to recognize and more powerful.
Every digital space in which companies operate has a design. Catalogs, procurement portals, virtual trade shows: each one implicitly communicates what is expected of those who use it, which behaviors are encouraged, and which are simply not accounted for.
The traditional B2B channel was designed for the transaction. Prices, technical specifications, delivery timelines: everything needed to make a purchase, organized as efficiently as possible. It is a functional design, and for what it sets out to do, it works well. The problem is what it leaves out: how a company actually operates, what drives it, how it behaves when things get complicated. That omission is not an oversight; it is a design choice. A choice that has made structurally invisible everything that matters most in a business relationship.
Jobs did not want Pixar employees to appear collaborative. He wanted them to actually be collaborative, and he understood that there is an enormous difference between the two. The first can be achieved with incentives and internal communications. The second requires something more subtle: an environment that makes collaboration the most natural thing to do, almost unavoidable, rather than something that demands a deliberate extra effort.
In B2B, this problem is real and widespread. Companies that want to build solid relationships with suppliers and partners often find themselves operating in digital spaces that were never designed with that goal in mind. What is usually missing is not the willingness. It is the right space.
A digital space that allows companies to share how they actually work, the choices they make, the values that guide them, the way they behave when things do not go as planned, is doing something close to what Pixar’s atrium did: creating the conditions for an encounter to become something more.
The best spaces, physical or digital, share a particular quality: when you are inside them, you do not think about how they are built. You think about the people you met, the conversations you had, what came out of those exchanges.
That is what aDoormore is trying to build: not a tool for managing B2B relationships, but a space designed for them to emerge. An environment where companies can show themselves for what they truly are, beyond the product catalog or the price list, and where someone looking for a real partner finally has something more substantial on which to base their choice.
Jobs was right: collaboration cannot be mandated. It has to be designed. And a well-designed space, in the end, tends to disappear. What remains are the relationships it made possible.
By the Marketing Team
