Cubicle

Propst had studied how people actually worked in offices and found that the prevailing arrangement, rows of desks in open bullpens, was degrading and inefficient. His Action Office system, first introduced as Action Office I in 1964 and refined as Action Office II in 1967, proposed a modular environment where workers could stand, sit, adjust their surfaces, and create visual privacy through movable panels. The design assumed that workers were professionals whose judgment about their own working conditions should be respected.

The panels were flexible by design, capable of being arranged in various configurations. What corporations discovered was that the panels could also be used to pack more workers into less space. By arranging the modules in identical rows of small enclosures, companies reduced real estate costs while giving each worker a nominal amount of privacy. The Action Office became the cubicle, and the cubicle became the defining spatial experience of late-twentieth-century office work.

Propst reportedly described the proliferation of dense cubicle layouts as monolithic insanity. Herman Miller earned billions from the system. By 2006, an estimated forty million Americans worked in cubicles. The open-office movement of the 2010s was, in part, a reaction against the cubicle, though studies have found that removing partitions often worsens the problems the cubicle was blamed for, reducing privacy and increasing distraction.