mrneoluddite/business

From the page: "The Cube Farm's 40-Year Harvest
By Michelle Heimburger
Thu, July 31, 2008

Love them or hate them, many of us spend the majority of our working hours (if not our waking hours) in cubicles. Some are personalized with decorative touches to feel more like home (or perhaps more like a war zone, a casino, or a modern art installation). Others are kept sterile and empty, to reduce distractions (or discourage late evenings at the office). But while life in cube-hives has benefits (ample storage, an illusion of privacy) and drawbacks (no actual privacy, all the coziness and space of a prison cell), it's simply business as usual for today's worker bees.

But how did we get to this dystopian world of drab, fabric-covered partitions and endless rows of lookalike veal pens stuffed full of human machines? Offices didn't always resemble factory farms (or so we've seen in old movies). So, when did we voluntarily put ourselves into boxes?

The blame (or praise) begins with Robert Propst, an art professor-turned-designer for mid-century furniture icon Herman Miller. His new type of office design, the "Action Office," broke up the sea of desks in the open-plan offices of the day. Forty years ago this month, his designs were unleashed on the public, and the rest is history.

But before you tack Propst's picture on your cube-wall dartboard, consider that it's not all his fault. His design was meant to give workers unique, configurable spaces, with partial privacy and more room than today's standard 64-square-foot pen. Management loved the idea of non-permanent walls, which were cheaper and faster to assemble -- and a sweet tax break, too -- so the comfort of employees soon had little to do with the redesign of the modern office. Propst later admitted some regrets over his contribution to the "monolithic insanity" of today's cube farms. Now if only the rest of us could escape from the monster he helped create."