The Cubicle Culture Sorry, Fellow Workers: Modular Workspaces Are Here To Stay. So Tack Up A Photo Of Your Family, Have A Sip Of Coffee And Force An Ergonomic Smile

Memorandum to: Corporate cogs and Dilbert fans Re: Your cubicle

They make your bedroom closet seem as spacious as a conference room. They offer all the privacy of an auditorium with all the coziness of a toll booth.

You can peer over them and hear through them. You yap on the phone, send e-mail to your friends and, occasionally, do a little work inside of them.

And, despite the daily dissing by comic strip character Dilbert, those sterile stalls are gobbling up more and more work space around the country. Now they’re gaining on us faster and getting fancier.

Since 1977, when those 8-by-10-foot shoe boxes started to really clutter our corporate shelves, cubicle sales have grown twentyfold, to $3.4 billion. In the last year alone, sales jumped 17 percent at cubicle giant (an oxymoron?) Haworth Inc. of Holland, Mich.

Little did you know that while you were typing at your terminal, a bunch of Haworth researchers, industrial designers, mechanical engineers and people whose titles include tongue-tying variations on the word “ergonomic” were pondering the fascinating future of your cube.

(If you find cubicle culture a little, er, square, imagine having their job.) Kurt Vander Schuur is a Haworth manager in charge of cubicle development and marketing. He gets excited by moveable panels. Wood panels. Smoked-glass, triangular, any-geometric-shape-you-want panels! Panels that - sit down for this one - fold up like an accordion for teamwork between neighboring cube dwellers and then, when privacy is needed, stretch back out again!

Imagine.

Dilbert (“I am king of my cubicle. Ruler of this tiny realm.”) has yet to discover its vast possibilities, Vander Schuur says.

There are, however, at least 50 furniture manufacturers who have. Fittingly, the three top sellers - Haworth, Herman Miller and Steelcase - are clumped within a 30-mile radius of each other in western Michigan. As close as cubby neighbors, you could say.

Sales at Haworth, in particular, are soaring because their cubicles are super cubicles, Vander Schuur says. This is the ‘90s, after all, and the ‘90s cubicle must be more flexible, more “individualistic,” if you will, and it must allow for employee “self-expression” in a “cost-effective way.”

“I’m sitting at one now,” he says.

The beloved Cube Farm began to crop up on our office landscape in the 1970s with what Haworth design manager Jeff Reuschel calls a “noble purpose”: replacing the “bullpens full of desks” that were the norm back then with “a more flexible, fluid solution.”

(Dilbert translation: Give workers a little privacy and maybe they won’t ask for more money.)

Decades before, it turns out, there had been something of a revolution in office thinking (another oxymoron?). Some theorists in Europe got the bright idea that we worker bees were self-motivated, Type A personalities that didn’t need to be watched constantly in an open pool of desks. We could be trusted - ho-ho-ho! - to do our duties behind a little screen.

Then, from such noble beginnings came … The Tax Break. Businesses, according to researcher Judy Voss of Haworth’s “ideation” department (yes, that’s the real name), bought the cubicles instead of putting up “fixed wall space” (re: offices) because tax laws allowed them to write off cubicle depreciation in as little as seven years. Note for the capitally challenged: Offices with real walls, Voss says, can’t be written off for almost 40 years.

Cubicle use exploded in 1976, she says, with the invention of the power-packed panel. That would be the part of your cubicle where all those wires stick out and lead to your computer, phone and high-tech gadgets.

Our fate was sealed, or, rather, wired. As Voss of “ideation” tells it, the more our equipment beeped and rang and whirred, the more we wanted our cubes to shield us from neighboring noise. And so, with supposedly soundproof panels, we cordoned ourselves off.

Today, around 40 million white collar workers toil in white collar stables around the country, according to a very rough estimate by the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association.

But productivity prophets such as Vander Schuur want to deliver us from architectural hell. In our future they see mobile bookcases, sliding panels and desks on wheels with a “technology box” mounted right into your “worktop,” which is what the uninitiated call a desktop.

Other cubby wizards at Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls have come up with a “personal environments system,” with which, for a mere $900 per cubicle, you can customize lighting and temperature and drown out neighbors with white noise.

At Haworth the work space of the future doesn’t remotely resemble the cluttered flat surface you sit behind today.

“We work in processes,” begins Haworth industrial designer Brian Alexander, “so our work files and papers - our cognitive artifacts - should be organized as works-in-progress.”

It should be no surprise that, to those who deal in cognitive artifacts, a desk is not just a desk, but “a memory extension.”

Huh?

And what will your “memory extension” look like?

Specimen A is a design award-winning desk that looks like a cross between the Mars rover and something out of the movie ET. It features a bicycle-seat-as-chair that even Kate Moss couldn’t fit her butt on and a fiberglass desktop that wraps around like a windshield.

Specimen B is more Spartan, a sleek contraption that looks like a ballet bar. It is to desks what the thong is to bathing suits. It features a tiny work surface, and a bar with clip-on trays so that, instead of setting projects down in piles, they will, in the words of one designer, “float around you in space.”

Ah, but don’t beg your boss to buy one - these desks are only prototypes.

What would Dilbert do with a desk like that?

And, by the way, those cube makers do read Dilbert:

Says Vander Schuur: “We smile all the way to the bank.”

MEMO: These 2 sidebars appeared with the story:

1. HOW THE BOX WAS BORN: A CUBICLE TIMELINE 1950s: Hamburg consultants Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, known as the Quickborner team, study the effect of office settings on productivity. Theory develops that office workers are relatively capable and do not need to be surveyed constantly. 1960s: A new breed of employee joins the U.S. workforce: the “professional,” needing more space than a clerical worker but less than a supervisor. IBM, Ford and DuPont experiment with office designs: free-standing screens for privacy, desks arranged in clusters. Bob Propst of Herman Miller in Zeeland, Mich., designs the first “cubicle.” 1970s: Quickborner theory takes off in America and leads to primitive cubicles. In 1976, the power-equipped panel is invented. Sales soar. 1980s: Economic boom brings heady times to cubicles. Hierarchies flourish; some companies have as many as 14 grades of cubicles - the more powerful the employee, the better the cubicle. 1990s: Corporate downsizing hurts cubicle diversity. Some companies cut back to one standard cubicle. Haworth and other makers try to give cubicles more personality.

2. LEARN TO SPEAK CUBICLE By Dale Fuchs Palm Beach Post The folks at Haworth Inc. are on the cutting edge of cubicle chic. Here are words from their world: Chunking - The way we remember things by association. A chunking device would be a box to deposit papers you don’t have time to do something more meaningful with. Churn rate - The speed by which employees are put on and taken off teams. Collective consciousness - Principle behind haute cubicle and desk couture, which states: If a project team knows what each member is working on, then the knowledge produced will be greater than the sum of the knowledge possessed by each teammate. Hot desking - Syn. Free address. Moving to a different work space each day because you don’t have an assigned desk. A downside of hot desking is that you don’t have the benefit of “cognitive artifacts” - that is, the little notes, “in” piles and other reminders you place around your work space. Teaming - The noun-as-verb term for working in teams, used when referring to the ‘90s management credo that “five department heads around a conference table are better than one.”