The Office has Changed. Some Things Haven't.

By now, almost everyone working in a modern office knows the story behind its design, or at least some version of the story.

For instance, many people think the much-maligned "cubicle" was developed by Robert Propst of Herman Miller in the early 1960's. It wasn't. Propst's "Action Office" system was bastardized by other furniture manufacturers and was quickly produced in hundreds, if not thousands of "cube' varieties, and propagated ubiquitously for fifty years until it abruptly died sometime after the Dot.com bust. At that point, something old became new again; the current Activity-based Work (ABW) concept. More on that later.

As the physically exhausting industrial work of the Nineteenth Century gave way to tertiary office work in the early Twentieth Century, architects and engineers struggled to find ways to design offices that measured worker's "productivity", (a relic metric from the last century when the production of widgets could be measured by how many came off the assembly line per hour.) Along with a desire to continue measuring all forms of human activity, was the desire to enable "productivity" through designing furniture and offices to support this goal. These offices were very noisy. One of the questionable academic outcomes of this period became known as either "Efficiency Programming" or Industrial Psychology. At the artful/intuitive end of this scale, was the beautiful work performed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. His exceptional, noise-dampening 1939 design of S.C. Johnson, Inc.'s headquarters’ building, shown above, was antecedent to today's ABW concepts.

Starting in the 1950's, some German efficiency consultants called the Quickborner Team, started to think about office productivity differently. Instead of dictating a design to which workers adapted, they chose instead to listen to the goals and desires of office workers and came up with what was called "Burolandshaft", loosely translated to mean "Office Landscape". This design addressed a number of things, not the least of which was flexibility and fluidity; workers could easily move the furniture around and adapt it to their needs of the moment. This configuration also produced a lot of noise because of the lack of walls and low ceilings.

In the 1960's, Probst based his Action Office design on Burolandshaft concepts, and started to manufacture furniture that allowed workers to adapt their configurations on the fly. In reaction to the noise problem generated by these designs, other furniture makers, i.e., Steelcase and Hayworth, etc. began producing the 'cube' which provided demountable panels in the hope of eliminating spurious noise. It didn’t. 

The death of the cube coincided with the millennial generation (and its pre-conceived notions of what work ‘should’ be) entering the workforce and the need to fit more software programmers in smaller spaces. The justification for such concentrations of workers ranged from that old measurement, ‘Productivity’ to increased ‘collaboration’ which was deemed to be socially desirable and that even spurious and unpredictable sparks of innovation might be realized by random encounters in these tight configurations. These designs led to “Benching” models. This Benching model produced massive amounts of noise and disruption.

Benching was balanced by shared or communal space, as well as private or restorative spaces. These areas were to compensate for the lack of personal space in an office and again, the hope that ‘collaboration’ would ignite unforeseen and spurious innovation between people that might have never met otherwise. This school of design became known as the Activity-based Work (ABW) concept.

The one constant in almost all of these office configurations was what inhabitants reported as ‘noise’, i.e., unwanted sounds that were interrupting what the individual or groups of individuals were working on.

Oddly, there were no behavioral sciences studies performed throughout these decades to determine how these office concepts actually performed for the inhabitants. There was a paternal ‘top down’ design ethic that suggested the architect or the efficiency expert knew best. Now there are a host of such studies, such as what the University of Sydney study shows or other Studies . But prior to 2009, no studies of this type were performed, except one. In 1974, I was graduating from Seattle University in a Special Studies major I termed “Architectural Psychology”. For my Senior Project, I obtained funding from the National Science Foundation and undertook a four month study of four different office configurations at the headquarters of Unigard Insurance in Redmond, WA. Although I didn’t know it then, it was the first behavioral science statistical study to measure variables across different office configurations. In short, it identified only one statistically significant variable in these offices; noise. Some things never change.

You can find this pre-computer/type-written study at my LinkedIn profile or at: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6oaay2mnmde9j09/AABfwHtil67Uj3HfB6NTzg9Sa?dl=0