“History doesn’t repeat itself, but if you look back far enough you’ll find that it rhymes.” Futurist Paul Saffo recently said this in a meeting with us. He was paraphrasing an aphorism often attributed to Mark Twain, but whatever its source the maxim relates to the discussion taking place about the future of work.

There’s plenty of “rhyme” in the words of Robert Propst, inventor of the Action Office system. In 1968, he wrote that “The real office consumer is the mind. More than anything else, we are dealing with a mind-oriented living space.”

Given the ubiquity of technology today, Propst’s words were prescient. The office is a state of mind. We once used to enter that state of mind by crossing the threshold of a building called “the office.” Today, we enter that state of mind by simply accessing our work-related data on our mobile devices. Work is no longer a place we go. It’s a thing we do, anywhere we are and at anytime.

Not surprisingly, because of the different properties offered by digital space, interacting with each other in the physical world is taking on new forms. This is evidenced in the proliferating new business models for delivering physical places dedicated to work, work clubs being one example.

Because so many people work so often and so meaningfully in digital space, they now seek new forms and new levels of social connectivity in the physical place. It is the human experience in the digital workspace that now drives the meaning, expectations, and behaviors that take place in our physical workplaces.

So, where does the furniture company that pioneered the cubicle stand? We think they’re both right, and the designer who birthed the cubicle, Robert Propst, would agree. For us, the best places to work give people a choice of where to work and how to work—if wide-open spaces suit the kind of work you do, go for them.

But people will always need privacy, and organizations around the world have found the good old cubicle a wonderful way to organize heads-down work and minimize distractions. The point is that to dictate any mode of working is not a good idea—even the most creative and team-oriented people in the world need to work alone sometimes.

That’s why we make everything from desks that snap together to cubicles that invert the landscape (higher walls on the aisle and lower ones where a team collaborates). And, then too, there is the original cubicle, which is doing very well 40+ years after it transformed how people work. In the end, it’s less about “Long Live the Cubicle” and more about “Long Live Choice.”