When engineers for US furniture manufacturer Herman
Miller designed steel frameworks to surround their metal desks
in the late fifties they called it the “Action Office.”
Later, the same company refined its original, semi-portable model
to design principles according to Marcel Propst’s theory
of a “facility built on change.” This theory, which
gained popularity in the mid-sixties, asserted that the right environment
would encourage productivity for its occupants. Herman Miller called
this “right” environment A02.
A02 became the grandfather of the modern cubicle – growing
from a semi-portable steel structure to become what we know call
the modern “cube farm.”
Walk into any office – from Toronto to Sydney to Chicago
to Bangladesh – and you’ll most likely find yourself
in one of these farms. Here, workers are seated in large, open
rooms yet they sit alone at their desks, or small clusters of desks,
separated from their co-workers by panels of partition boards.
The subject of many jokes, home to fictional characters and even
a video game (Cubefarm: Vol.1 Attack of the HypnoSys), the cubicle
has been a basic office design component for over 40 years and
is still used as the primary means of conserving space while attempting
to retain individual privacy.
While the partition boards are designed to decrease noise distractions
in open offices the true, often untapped, power of a cubicle is
that it can transform each wall into a viable work surface or a “nook” for
personal expression.
In 2001, Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams collaborated
with San Francisco design company IDEO to design the “ultimate” cubicle.
Designers spent their working lives in cubicles for two months
and made creative modifications according to what they discovered
out of their experience.
Scott Adams spent 16 years working in a cubicle himself and after
the fame of his comic strip character Dilbert, he started to receive
thousands of emails from cubicle workers needing to vent about
their environments. As he told CNN: “Somehow, accidentally,
I realized I’d become a leading authority on what’s
wrong with cubicles. You don’t have to be Thomas Edison to
realize there’s a product possibility there.”
The ultimate cubicle designed by Adams and IDEO combines comfort
with a youthful sense of irreverence and innovation.
Automatic lighting adjustment throughout the day that simulates
the sun’s movement through the sky; modular “cubicle
kit” packages for individualized seats, computers and displays
(fish tanks, hammocks and a hamster wheel are options); floor panels
that can rotate between Persian carpet, Japanese Tatami mats or
freshly cut grass; a punching bag; a lunch cooler built into the
floor - these are the new elements of the ultimate (or rather,
utopian) cubicle.
Adams and IDEO aren’t the only designers who have visions
of a better future for the cube farm.
In a two-year period between 2000 and 2002, designers for IBM
partnered with Steelcase, the office furniture manufacturer,
to design the “cubicle of the future.”
Called “BlueSpace,” the hi-tech workspace created
by this collaboration has moveable computer screens, sensors and
individual heating, lighting and ventilation controls. A projector
transforms any area of the cubicle into a touch screen.
Both projects had designers create an aesthetic, technologically
innovative livable cubicle space. Each took a basic component
of office design and transformed it into an environment with
life to it. IDEO designers used humour and optimism. In BlueSpace,
the cubicle became its own organism, with software applications
working at a cellular level to orchestrate lighting, heating,
ventilation and sensor detections.
Projected as the “next-generation workspace,” IBM’s
BlueSpace can be viewed at the IBM Industry Solutions Lab in Hawthorne,
New York, and at Steelcase in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Several prototypes
were designed from this project, one of which was exhibited at
Disney World. http://www.research.ibm.com/bluespace/
Like BlueSpace, the ultimate cubicle is more of a touring art
installation than a product ready to hit the market, yet IDEO may
link the flexible features of the cubicle to other projects, particularly
with designs for office furniture maker Steelcase, one of the company’s
clients. Adams features the model on his website, http://www.dilbert.com.
Cubicles can be designed, configured and “re-packaged” in
any number of creative ways, yet the design itself still does not
solve some of the inherent problems of the cubicle. While it may
seem faddish, researchers have been conducting studies in the area
of workspace design for over two decades and the results are consistent:
when workers spend a significant time isolated, whether alone in
a cubicle or not seated closely to their co-workers, it reduces
person-to-person communication among the members of an organization.
This often affects morale and can lead to a decline in production
delays.
Part II will study this topic further, looking into the issue
of how office design can affect retention and productivity. Tom
Allen, a researcher at MIT, conducted a decade-long study in the
sixties and seventies on the way in which engineers communicated
in research and development laboratories. His study found that
when workers are seated in desks more than 30 metres apart, communication
is reduced, roughly, to zero. His findings are still relevant today.
Part III will be an in-depth look at the work of Karen Stephenson,
a New York based business-school professor and anthropologist.
Stephensen does more than re-design offices. She likens her role
to that of a radiologist seeking to x-ray the social networks of
an organization. Her “x-ray” is the study of relationships
and patterns of trust that have developed between workers in a
given organization. Since 2000, Stephenson has partnered with Steelcase,
the world’s largest manufacturer of office furniture, to
use her techniques in office design.
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