To bring you the latest in workplace thought and theory I have visited numerous cyber discussions and read countless e-zine articles on work environments.  It seems that they always come back to one topic… the office cubical.

Consider the cubicle. It's easy: just swivel 360° in your imitation Aeron chair. Ponder the various surfaces decorated with stacks of memos and coffee rings. Meditate on the file cabinets underfoot, the shelves overhead, the glow of the fluorescent reading light. Reflect upon the three walls papered with Post-it notes and your kid's macaroni art. It's hideous, but it's home.

The cubicle was not born evil, or even square for that matter. It began, in fact, as a vision of workplace interaction and efficiency. The year was 1968. Despite my individual efforts to the contrary, Nixon won the presidency (to the contrary he was, of course, born evil). The Beatles released The White Album and I had no notion to tuck a half dozen away for future wealth and prosperity… nor did I buy gold at that time for $68/ounce (now over $750/ounce), or Polaroid at $14/share. What did I buy, you ask?  Why I bought a used 1965 Chevy Corvair (the car they ultimately dubbed, “unsafe at any speed”).

Anyway back to a failed experiment of another kind… home-furnishings company Herman Miller (Research) in Zeeland, Mich., launched the Action Office. It was the brainchild of Bob Propst, who had joined the company as director of research.  You have probably watched an old movie at one time or the other that showed a sea of desks stretching to the horizon.  That is pretty much the way it was in large companies, at least the ones I visited. 

After years of prototyping and studying how people work, and vowing to improve on the open-bullpen office that dominated much of the 20th century, Propst designed a system he thought would increase productivity (hence the name Action Office). The young designer, who also worked on projects as varied as heart pumps and tree harvesters, theorized that productivity would rise if people could see more of their work spread out in front of them, not just stacked in an in-box.  I have always been fond of stacking it in boxes below the desk… you know what they say, “out of sight, out of mind,” just kidding of course Jasmin, if you happen to be reading this.

Returning to the story, after a little CYA with the box joke … the new system included plenty of work surfaces and display shelves; partitions were a part of it, intended to provide privacy and places to pin up works in process. The Action Office even included varying desk levels to enable employees to work part of the time standing up, thereby encouraging blood flow and staving off exhaustion.

But inventions seldom obey the creator's intent. "The Action Office wasn't conceived to cram a lot of people into a little space," says Herman Miller's former marketing chief, who helped launch the system in 1968. "It was driven that way by economics."

Economics was the one thing Propst had failed to take into account. But it was also what triggered the cubicle's runaway success. I understand that around the time the Action Office was born, a growing breed of white-collar workers, whose job titles fell between secretary and boss, was swelling the workforce (Yeah boomers).  Also, real estate prices were rising, as was the cost of reconfiguring office buildings, making the physical office a drag on the corporate budget. Cubicles, or "systems furniture," as they are euphemistically called, offered a cheaper alternative for redoing the floorplan.

From what I have read, another critical factor in the cubicle's rapid ascent was Uncle Sam. During the 1960s, to stimulate business spending, the Treasury created new rules for depreciating assets. The changes specified clearer ranges for depreciation and established a shorter life for furniture and equipment, vs. longer ranges assigned to buildings or leasehold improvements. (Today companies can depreciate office furniture in seven years, whereas permanent structures--that is, offices with walls--are assigned a 39.5-year rate.)  Now tell me, just how interesting is that, you can blame your cubical on tax law!

The upshot: A company could recover its costs quicker if it purchased cubes. When clients told Herman Miller of that unexpected benefit, it became a new selling point for the Action Office. After only two years on the market, sales soared from the accounts that I have seen. Competitors took notice.

That's when Propst's original vision began to fade. Herman Miller kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle.  As Steelcase, Knoll, and other major office furniture makers brought their versions to market, they figured out that what businesses wanted wasn't to give employees a holistic experience. The customers wanted a cheap way to pack workers in, Duh?

Propst's workstations were designed to be flexible, but in practice they were seldom altered or moved at all. Lined up in identical rows, they became the world describe in the Dilbert comic strip series.  Herman Miller, is now a $1.5-billion-a-year company, and is a frequent sponsor of National Public Radio, to promote their $1,000 a pop Aeron desk chair. 

I don’t know if it is too early to say goodbye to the cubical, but a new generation of work-space design promises to tear down those padded walls. Office architects are envisioning improved cubicles-- newbicles?--that feel private yet collegial, personal yet interchangeable, smaller yet somehow more spacious. Employing advanced materials, tomorrow's technology and the fruits of sociological research, designers are fitting the future workplace to workers who are increasingly mobile and global. Meanwhile, bosses are demanding rent-saving, productivity- boosting solutions to convince us that cubicles are cool. It might even work.