Cubicle 2.0

Herman Miller, the American office furniture company that helped inflict the cubicle on to an unsuspecting American workforce, recently announced the successor to the cubicle. Woohoo ! I hear you scream, no more living in a 6 foot by 8 foot box. At last ! Good news all round then? Well, not exactly. Herman Miller have gone to some trouble with this design; sleek ergonomics, curved walls, see-through partitions, hundreds of redundancies, spectacular brochures and more hackneyed cliches than you can shake a stick at….. And a door. That’s correct, this design has a door, almost like a real office. Here is a quote taken from their website describing the process of creating the “My Studio Environments” office. This name is, of course, only slightly more pretentious than Robert Propst’s name for his cubicle, “The Action Office.” That’s progress I guess.

Design Story

When Herman Miller asked designer Douglas Ball to develop a new system that would address an organization’s real estate constraints while maximizing the effectiveness of the 6′ x 8′ workstation, he came back with a concept that could change the landscape of systems furniture.

In conceiving of My Studio, Ball went back to the early days when there were just desks, returns, and credenzas, and when a 6′x 8′ space was considered generous. And he made the person the center of the workstation.

“I worked out in my mind a plan as to how you would reorient a person in that space,” he says. “How would you have a principle work surface, a credenza behind, and something alongside that would give a person more storage and more counter space?”

He says his mind was “really into the very small, very controlled environment. The corners would be rounded. There’s a circle and the person would sit in the center of it. You would just swing the chair around and everything was right there, within reach.”

That basic idea is the foundation of the design and development of My Studio.

Ball also introduced the idea of a high aisle-side wall as opposed to what’s been traditionally done with the panel environment where the center tends to be very high with overhead storage attached.

“We wanted to do the opposite,” Ball says. “We said we’d like to have the center low so you can see across to the other side. You can see the worker across from you, but the height of that is critical. We wanted to be able to block eye vision from a seated position, but if you lift your head, you can make eye contact. With this product, you can have collaboration and you don’t have to move.”

I have two things to say about this design:

1. It is a six feet by eight feet box. No matter what you do to it, unless you can somehow bend the laws of physics, it will always be a six feet by eight feet box. It might be a very nice six feet by eight feet box, but it’s barely enough space to lie on the floor to stretch that aching back caused by having three office mates capable of poking their noses into everything you do during the day.
2. It is purposely designed to allow a minimum of personal adjustments. Curved plastic walls that are going to be very difficult to hang pictures from, barely enough desk space to put a computer and a cup of coffee, and a sliding “shoji” type door that will make you feel as though you have just closed your own coffin lid.

And you thought the current cubicle was claustrophobic. Just wait ’till you try this baby. If anyone out there has tried this during their first trials, I would love to hear from you. Maybe I have it all wrong and this is the best thing to happen in office design since the typewriter was invented, but just looking at this picture almost brings on a panic attack. If you click on either of the photos, you can get the full sales pitch from Herman Miller.
I would like to be able to say something positive about this new design, but the best I can come up with is, “What the fuck are they thinking?”

Actually, that’s unfair on Herman Miller, they are just responding to customer demand. What the customer wants is a tiny weeny, itty-bitty little space to house as many employees as cheaply as possible. Enter the “My Studio Environments.” If they could work out a way of stacking these things on top of each other, that would solve all sorts of problems. Watch this space……