Where do all the paperclips go?

/ 01 July 2009

Business and career conundrums
This month, how chic is your cubicle?

Business and career conundrums.
This month, how chic is your cubicle?

In the book Future Shock, published in 1970, Alvin Toffler, one of the world’s leading futurists, predicted a world where society ‘shifts from a work orientation towards greater involvement in leisure.’ Toffler wasn’t alone in his optimistic view of the 21st century and beyond. There was considerable agreement that technological advances would create increased productivity and increased leisure time. In the developed economies at least, a post-industrial leisure based society awaited.

Unfortunately, the age of leisure has failed to materialise. Quite the opposite has happened. Most of us work longer hours than ever. As it became apparent that the Utopian vision of an idyllic world without work was misplaced, attention turned to how the workplace might evolve instead, making our working lives more efficient and pleasant.

There were bold predictions. Workers would be liberated from the confines of the office by new technologies; armies of executives would travel the globe as mobile human offices, connected to their colleagues and customers by modern technology. Yet, while the road warrior does exist, many workers are still firmly entrenched in a physical workspace – the office.

Nor does the workspace look like the futuristic predictions of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where the aim is to seamlessly merge the physical and virtual worlds. Other anticipated changes such as hot desking or hotelling (sharing a desk, workstation or other resource normally allocated to one person), huddle spaces and touchdown areas (informal meeting areas design to foment creativity and personal communication) are slowly seeping into organisational consciousness.

For the masses, the reality is the cubicle. According to Fortune magazine, 40 million Americans work in cubicles. There’s even a how to spruce up your cubicle book, Cube Chic. If you’re looking for someone to blame, Robert Propst is the name you’re after. In 1968, Herman Miller, a home furnishings firm in the US, launched a new concept in office furnishings – the Action Office. It was the forerunner of the modern cubicle. Propst, the firm’s president and chief inventor, didn’t envision his brainchild quite this way, but sadly, economics plus Action Office equals lots of tiny cubicles crammed into the office floor.

Extracted from Where do all the paperclips go?… and 127 other business & career conundrums by Steve Coomber and Marc Woods, published by Capstone, price £9.99