Redesigning Cubicles: Some Ideas from FastCompany

Like death and taxes, cubicles will always be with us, and so will complaints about working in them. Rachel Z. Arndt writing in FastCompany, suggests several ways to make life better for “America’s 40 million cube dwellers.” Add plants and a foldout chair. Subtract wall height. Go for adjustability, in the desk height and light levels, the latter to help with seeing the screen during web calls. Good ideas. Here’s another: Be creative in planning the furniture layout. Make layouts more organic and free-flowing. Give people choices for where they work and gather. Use furniture to mimic the variety of an urban landscape. These ideas mesh with what Robert Propst, the inventor of the first open plan system Action Office, intended. His original idea was to use his invention to make the workplace a “kinetic, active, alert, and vigorous environment.”