Open-plan offices in publishing and the myth of workplace design efficiency

Global Issues in Design and Visuality in the 21st Century

Global Design & Visuality

Headline: Cubicles Rise in a Brave New World of Publishing

The New York Times

The open-plan office space complete with cubicles has broken down the once hallowed walls of Manhattan's literary elite: publishing houses. Editors, who once prided themselves on their well-appointed offices reminiscent of British gentlemen's clubs, must eschew their former reclusiveness in favor of chummy shoulder-to-shoulder camaraderie. The change is driven by falling profit margins and the desire to maintain headquarters within Manhattan, close to the literary agents and media outlets that are the wheels on the publishing vehicle. Many editors consider the idea of open-plan offices and cubicles anathema to the intellectual work publishing entails. Those needing more quiet spaces are forced to work at home in the evenings or slink off to the tiny conference rooms known as "quiet cars." Open-plan offices are becoming standard in many industries, despite any real evidence that the design contributes in any real way to work quality or efficiency. Open-plan offices are the design equivalent of the tail wagging the dog.

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Design is pervasive and quickly becomes embedded in society in ways that come to seem natural and as though they have always been there, in just that form.

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Ways of working often follow trends that have little evidence-based science to demonstrate that the approaches are superior, or even truly desirable from any perspective other than trendiness. Consider the Google work environment: There are slides between floors, acoustically supported napping pods, ping-pong and other table games. Google is also a proponent of flexible, completely mobile work environments. In many ways, Google might be said to be anti-cubicle. However, the company has adapted the open environment that is one of the primary arguments for using cubicles in the workplace.

Does it relate to other disciplines?

In the classic film The Apartment, Jack Lemmon is cast as C.C. Baxter, one of close to thirty-two thousand employees located in the Manhattan head office of Consolidated Insurance, a life insurance company. Baxter reports each day to his desk -- in a flotilla of identical stations arranged in precise rows in an oversized workspace that appears to take up an entire floor of an office building. The film was produced before workers began wearing headphones and ear buds to listen to music rather than the cacophony created by herds of co-workers in open-plan offices. It is worth noting that the open-plan office design was originally conceived in Germany in the 1950s. One can easily picture the German version of this busy hive of efficient, industrious workers, overlaid with the stoic conformity of a 1950s office vibe.

Open workspaces are generally more economical to lease than workspaces that contain individual offices constructed of solid materials like cherry paneling or frosted sheets of non-shatter glass. Open workspaces are also much easier to find occupants for when a landlord raises the rent to offer the workspace to a completely different type of occupant who is willing to meet the terms of the new lease. These economic factors dictate the way new office buildings are constructed and influence the reconfiguration of renovated old office buildings.

Yet all these changes, which acquiesce to constrained budgets and the rhetoric about the congenial and serendipitous productivity of cubical dwellers, do not jive with the mounting evidence that these so-called benefits are purely hyperbole.