Cubed

I would dearly love to meet some of the people who devise office environments. I think that they are some of the brightest, most innovative people around. Also some of the most whacked out, craziest, totally unbelievably stupid. As an example of the latter, I offer the people -- I think it was Hermann Miller, but don't hold me to that -- who came up with the idea of the 'desk in a box' -- all your office possessions in a large wheeled box that you would move around as needed to 'meet' with other people. Wow! Edgy! Slick! Stupid! The guy who came up with it later said that it had been a great idea, but the environment wasn't ready for it. And the poor schmucks who had to live with it? And for the latter -- what about the Aeron chair? Its ugly -- and works like a champ.


The concept of how you make an environment 'work' is and has been for quite some time interesting to me. Great work, I think, doesn't require great surroundings to be productive -- but if you're not a great worker, then great surroundings help you get to the point where you're better than if the surroundings were standard office blah. This guy has some interesting observations, as do the people who commented to what he said. Oh, I know -- none of the cutting edge insights are going to make themselves known to the cube farms. And they vary -- where I work is substantially better than the cube farm where my wife works -- I have about 40 square feet of space, plus about fourteen linear feet of desk, and lockable bookshelves; she's got a quarter of that, or less. She once observed that the more they gave her to do, the less space they gave her to do it in. But still, its interesting to see what people think about what workers need (which is usually a superset, sometimes a supersuperset, of what they get) in order to do their best work.

Cool stuff, and fun to think about.