Ok, breaking the streak of this having NOTHING to do with Cubicles, we get (via Google “What’s Hot” and Technorati)…
Cubicles: The great mistake
Even the designer of the cubicle thinks they were maybe a bad idea, as millions of ‘Dilberts’ would agree.
By Julie Schlosser, FORTUNE Magazine
March 22, 2006: 2:03 PM ESTNEW YORK (FORTUNE Magazine) – Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called “monolithic insanity.”
Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.
The article goes on to discuss the history and original concept of the “Action Office” which became the cubicle as we know and … love?… it. I’m very pleased that my present employer doesn’t use them; the open-desks layout took a little getting used to (probably about my first day), but it’s much more congenial.
A bit of Trivia on cubicles you might find interesting. The first commercial installation was in 1969 and the #1 song was “Aquarius Let the Sunshine In,” and that same year 400,000 people showed up at a llittle dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. for the Woodstock Festival. In the height of the “Let Freedom Ring era,” the cubicle was born.