A Brief History of the Office Cubicle

In 1964, the workplace cubicle was born. For that you may thank Robert Propst, a designer at the Herman Miller furnishings firm. Four years earlier, he had proposed a radical different to the workplace bullpen: the Action Office. He envisioned it as a holistic and built-in system designed to extend employee effectivity whereas offering an ergonomic workspace.

Sadly, the Action Office quickly devolved into soulless cubicle farms, pilloried in Dilbert cartoons and despised by workplace staff in every single place. Chief amongst the complaints: noisy coworkers and a scarcity of privateness.

To handle each points, Propst and Jack Kelley created the Acoustic Area Conditioner in 1975. The AAC was a noise-canceling machine designed to hush undesirable background chatter. The globe turned recognized round the firm as the maskitball. “It was basketball season,” Kelley defined to Kristen Gallerneaux, a curator at The Henry Ford (the place the AAC pictured beneath resides). The moniker caught.

Henry Miller’s Acoustic Area Conditioner was a white-noise machine for company workspaces.The Henry Ford

The 19-centimeter-diameter globe was certainly just a bit smaller than a basketball. It perched atop a cubicle wall roughly 2 meters from the ground. High frequencies have been emitted from the high of the globe and mid- and low-level frequencies from the equator. Office staff may tune the machine inside preset limits. In bigger open workplaces, AACs may very well be spaced each 3 to three.5 meters to create a white-noise zone.

The concept and actuality of Herman Miller’s Action Office

The AAC was half of a bigger effort at Herman Miller to optimize workplace acoustics. Propst and Michael Wodka wrote The Action Office Acoustic Handbook: A Guide for the Open Plan Facility Manager, Planner and Designer (Herman Miller Research Corp., 1975) as a handbook for designing open-office workspaces.

This video reveals the Action Office and its successor, the Action Office 2:

The History of Herman Miller Action Office II (AO2)www.youtube.com

The guide lays out quantitative guides for finest practices, comparable to not having to talk louder than 60 decibels over a distance of 1.8 meters for regular dialog. The background hum of a typical workplace they put at 40 to 50 dB. It’s not all about retaining quiet, although. They counsel creating pockets of “bustle,” to kind a blanket of sound. When issues are too quiet, particular person sounds will stand out and startle and irritate staff.

The majority of the handbook pertains to area configuration. Small cubicles tightly packed in rows—the setup I’ve all the time had the misfortune to work in—have been deemed an absolute no-no. Propst and Wodka referred to as these unhappy cubicles “a blank little island in a sea of sub-enclosures where high density and high invisibility are combined with irritating results.” Truth. They termed the downside “relationship blindness,” as a result of individuals disappear visually and develop into mere disembodied voices.

I first encountered a poorly applied model of the Herman Miller Action Office proper out of school, once I went to work for a big consulting agency. It was dismal.

When I shifted to a federal authorities job, I gained entry to the complete Herman Miller design guide and drooled over the many attainable configurations of my new cubicle—till my boss instructed me there was no price range for my dream workspace. Indeed, the backside line is mainly what doomed the Action Office. Throughout company America, financial realities collided with Propst’s imaginative and prescient as managers tried to jam extra individuals into an outlined area with little regard for employee or workspace wants. Standardization, slightly than configurability, turned the norm.

Propst got here to remorse his invention of the Action Office. Near the finish of his life, he lamented, “Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people. They make little, bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rathole places.”

The Action Office nonetheless has relevance as we speak

Propst might have had regrets, nevertheless it’s price revisiting the concepts that led him to design the Action Office in the first place. Most of them are outlined in his 1968 guide, The Office: A Facility Based on Change (Business Press International).

“Face to face involvement is the premier communication tool,” Propst wrote. “Unmatched for subtlety and efficiency but also a present wasteland of mysterious inhibitions and limitation, it requires revisualization.”

Propst thought deeply about efficient communication in an workplace—the numerous challenges of an excessive amount of communication, redundant communication, out-of-date communication, insulated communication, and low-grade data. He noticed the disastrous results of poor workplace layouts on communication, and the follow-on results on staff’ creativity and motivation, what as we speak we’d name burnout. He acknowledged that duties may take hours, days, and even weeks to finish and that workplace workstations ought to replicate these timescales. Propst understood the severe well being issues {that a} sedentary desk job may induce and labored so as to add motion and stream to the workplace. He pushed for giving staff choices and management over their workspace. Finally, he believed that staff needs to be allowed to alter their minds and reply to errors as they emerge. He believed in grace with change.

The Acoustic Area Conditioner was just a bit smaller than a basketball—therefore its nickname inside the firm: the maskitball. The Henry Ford

Knowing how a lot thought and care Propst invested in his idea for the Action Office, I perceive extra clearly why he was so very upset with the way it performed out in the actual world.

As for the AAC, manufacturing ceased in the early Nineteen Eighties. Perhaps the maskitball was no match for private headphones to tune out annoying colleagues. The Sony Walkman had debuted in 1979, offering staff the potential to hearken to music with out disturbing their neighbors. In 2000, the Bose Corp. launched its Quiet Comfort line of noise-canceling headphones. And as we speak, noise-canceling options in earbuds are commonplace. Now that we’ve got the means to handle acoustical interruptions in the workspace, perhaps designers and engineers can flip to fixing the myriad different issues of cubicle design. Perhaps it’s time to lastly embrace Propst’s Action Office.

Part of a persevering with collection historic artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of know-how.

An abridged model of this text seems in the November 2023 print concern as “White Noise, Inc.”