Robert Probst originally designed the Action Office system in the 1960s to encourage collaboration and movement among workers, but employers instead arranged the partitions into rigid cubicles that isolated employees, showing how workplace design can unintentionally undermine creative goals; modern offices are now searching for a better balance between open areas to foster interaction and private spaces for focused individual work, with technology companies at the forefront of experimental new designs that combine both.

1. Universitatea de Știin e Agronomiceț și Medicină Veterinară
București
Facultatea de Management, Inginerie În Agrivultura iș
Dezvoltare Rurală
Specializarea: Inginerie Economică în Agricultură
Coordonator: Frumușelu Mihai
Student: Grigore Marian – Cristian
Morus Mihai - Ionut
Grupa: 8104

2. Robert Probst never meant to
invent the cubicle. It was the
1960s and a growing class of
North Americans were being
dubbed as “knowledge workers.”
Probst, head of research for
furniture manufacturer Herman
Miller, thought their desks stifled
their thinking. Why should people
line up like clerks in a 19th-
century counting house? Why
clean their desks each day? For
that matter, why sit down?
Probst, a restless inventor, was
always in motion. In collaboration
with the designer George Nelson,
he invented the Action Office – a
system of furniture that kept
workers moving between
attractive surfaces, serving the
mind by freeing the body.
It was a flop. And the Action Office II, introduced in 1968, had partitions.
Employers chose to arrange them at right angles and in straight lines.
That was how a utopian designer’s vision devolved into the world of Dilbert.
“The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity,”
Probst said in the late 1990s, shortly before his death.

3. In the past 40 years, the basic tension
in office design – between collaboration
and concentration – has not been
resolved. This challenge has never been
more important than today, when the
labour force is filled with perma-temps,
technology allows workers to be fully
mobile, and employers are pushing to
reduce their real estate footprints.
Open offices more suited to
collaboration, and also conveniently
cheaper, are popular with managers.
But not with everyone. Last year, a
survey by international architecture
firm Gensler found that 53 per cent of
American workers were being disturbed
when they tried to focus. (I’m with
them; I avoid my open-plan newsroom
when I’m writing, or retreat behind
white noise in my headphones.)
The new design consensus is a middle ground:
Every office, it turns out, needs space for
collaboration as well as some places to hide.
The technology sector is leading the way. Here,
innovation rules and companies are obsessed
about managing their internal culture. Denise
Cherry, director of design at O+A, a design
consulting firm in San Francisco, is among the
explorers. The firm has built offices for many tech
startups as well as established companies
including Facebook.
Visually, O+A’s interiors are designed to cleverly
express the prevailing Bay Area values of
creativity and innovation. The dot-com cliché of
the foosball table seems to be fading, in favour of
a new formula that includes art, music rooms and
custom-made furniture and design elements.
Accordingly, O+A’s projects have included vintage

4. But how the office works is, more fundamentally, in
question. The solitary work of software coders and
graphic designers has to be balanced with teamwork,
in an ever-changing ratio. O+A designed an two-floor
office space in San Francisco for Uber “that’s 25,000
square feet of experimentation,” Cherry says. This
means testing different units within an open floor.
“Developers usually work in eight- to 10-person
teams, so we craft space around them,” she says.
These “studios” are fully enclosed, with lounge and
conference spaces, even kitchens. “The goal of each
studio is to create a small ‘startup’ within a larger
organization,” Cherry says, to encourage an
entrepreneurial mindset that gets projects done.
At the same time, the Uber office includes “work
caves,” upholstered niches where employees can
work on solitary projects without closing a door on
their colleagues. The goal is to balance space for
individual tasks with room for collaboration. “We
know there are issues with the open office,” Cherry
continues. “Introverts can’t focus the way they need
to.”
O+A has been around long enough to see workplaces
and workplace culture change and change again. In
the 1990s, the open office became a given;
collaboration was the buzzword.

5. Steve Jobs, when he was chief executive of Pixar, pushed for its open
headquarters to include an atrium space where all employees would
have to, at some point, bump into each other. Fifteen years later, that
model has been widely adopted. “Very few, if any, of our clients use
closed offices,” Cherry says, “because they have an interest in a more
democratic or flatly structured company.”
“Much of our design lately has been in experimentation on maintaining
the flat structure while providing areas of respite or concentration for
all individuals – not just those lucky enough for a private office,” she
adds.

6. That tension is an old one. In his recent book Cubed: A Secret History of the
Workplace, cultural critic Nikil Saval traces two centuries’ worth of office culture.
His account makes clear that employers have always seen the office as a machine
to create hierarchy and control staff.
Is there a perfect synthesis of open and private space? In Toronto, design firm
MSDS Studio has just completed a sharp new office for Shopify that pursues that
goal. The company, which provides e-commerce infrastructure for small
businesses, bridges the physical and digital worlds. Designer Jessica Nakanishi
explains that the office is divided into a “market,” including customers’ products,
while the back office is designed to evoke a container shipping.

7. Open office spaces are separated from glassed-in, soundproof meeting areas; for in-
between zones, screens of aluminum louvers provide permeable walls of visual and
aural privacy. “Those louvers help to break up sight lines and sound,” adds designer
Jonathan Sabine. “You can create a hierarchy of privacy in these spaces – when they
need privacy, it has to be absolute, and then there are desks. But there’s an in-
between.”
MSDS also designed large wheeled “crates,” each of which contains a couch
surrounded by sound-buffering textiles. They can be wheeled together “for a few people
to talk quietly, not bother other people, and get work done,” Sabine says.
Is this the cubicle of the future? Given the constant shifts in office culture, maybe not,
and Cherry doesn’t see that as a big problem. “Our clients understand that if you move
fast, things might break.”

8. Bibliografie: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/