A cubicle farm

A cubicle desk is a partially enclosed workspace, separated from neighboring workspaces by partitions, generally five to six feet high. It is partially or entirely open on one side to allow access. Horizontal work surfaces are usually suspended from the partitions, as is shelving, overhead storage, and other amenities. Download high resolution version (516x700, 41 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Download high resolution version (516x700, 41 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... A desk is a furniture form and a class of table. ...

The term cubicle comes from the latin cubiculum, for bed chamber. It was used in English as early as the 15th century. It eventually came to be used for small chambers of all sorts, and for small rooms or study spaces with partitions which do not reach to the ceiling.

Like the older carrel desk, a cubicle seeks to give a degree of privacy to the user while taking up a minimum of space in a large or medium sized room. Like the modular desk of the middle of the 20th century, it is composed of a variety elements that can be arranged at will with standard hardware or custom fasteners, depending on the design. Installation is generally performed by professionals, although some cubicles allow configuration changes to be performed by users without specific training. Cubicles are highly configurable, allowing for great a variety of elements such as work surfaces, overhead bins, drawers, and the like to be installed, depending on the individual user's needs. A carrel desk is a very small desk with high sides meant to visually isolate its user from any surrounding, in a partial or total manner. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the...

Some sources attribute the introduction of the cubicle desk to the computer chip manufacturer Intel Inc. during the 1960s. Its creation is more generally attributed to a designer from Colorado, Robert Propst who worked for Herman Miller Inc., a major manufacturer of office furniture. Based on a 1965 prototype and named the Action Office, the cubicle was a modular unit with an open plan, the first such unit in the country. It was designed with the intention of providing space to work, privacy, and an increase in productivity. The unit even promoted periodic work while standing (to increase blood flow) with varied desk heights. It was certainly not designed to increase employee density in small areas of office space. It quickly beacame a successful product due to the rise in white-collar jobs, rise in office remodeling costs, and government changes in office furniture depreciation specifications. It continued to be developed by Propst and Herman Miller Inc. through the following decades, earning the title of Most Significant Design since 1960 from the Worldesign Congress in 1985. Later modifications to the Action Office included making more storage room available and allowing for collaborative workspace. One design, dubbed Resolve, using technology and 120 degree corners, was permanently added to the Museum of Modern Art(MoMA) in New York City, two years after its creation in 1999. In 2000 Robert Propst died, but is known to have regretted to some extent what his idea had evolved into and become, calling it a contribution to "monolithic insanity." Herman Miller (Research) is still a major and acclaimed designer and producer of furniture. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, HKEx: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is a U.S.-based multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... The 1960s decade refers to the years from 1960 to 1969, inclusive. ... Official language(s) English Capital Denver Largest city Denver Area  - Total  - Width  - Length  - % water  - Latitude  - Longitude Ranked 8th 269 837 km² 451 km 612 km 0. ... 1965 (MCMLXV) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1965 calendar). ... Prototypes or prototypical instances combine the most representative attributes of a category. ... Blood flow is the flow of blood in the cardiovascular system. ... A desk is a furniture form and a class of table. ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... View across garden, in new MoMA building by Yoshio Taniguchi (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. ... General Electric GE90-115B fanblade, on display at MOMA. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. ... Nickname: The Big Apple Motto: Official website: City of New York Location [[Image:|250px|250px|Location of City of New York, New York]] Location in the state of New York Government Counties (Boroughs) Bronx (The Bronx) New York (Manhattan) Queens (Queens) Kings (Brooklyn) Richmond (Staten Island) Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R... 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... This article is about the year 2000. ...

An office filled with cubicles is called a cube farm. Although humourous, the phrase usually has negative connotations. Cube farms are often found in hi-tech companies, but they also crop up in the insurance industry and other service-related fields. Many cube farms were built during the dotcom boom. An office is a room or other area in which people work, but may also denote a position within an organisation with specific duties attached to it (see officer, office-holder, official); the latter is in fact an earlier usage, office as place originally referring to the location of one... A cubicle desk forms an integral whole with the five or six foot high partitions that separate it from the neighbors. ... Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot. ...

Bad planning and cheap approaches

South view of cubicle

North view of cubicle

The cubicle desk is a much reviled and often mocked piece of office furniture in large part because of the expectations it provokes but rarely fulfils. An array of cubicle desks gives more peace and quiet to its users than if they were all working in an open office with no partitions, as is the case with many newsrooms and quite a few other kinds of offices. However, promoters of cubicle desks often present them as magic ingredients which can make noise levels and other distractions fall to zero in any office after their installation. Download high resolution version (1500x900, 392 KB)clean cubicle seen from North I have taken this picture with my camera and I am placing it in the public domain --AlainV 02:11, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC) This cubicle measures 8 feet by 10 feet File links The following pages link... Download high resolution version (1500x900, 392 KB)clean cubicle seen from North I have taken this picture with my camera and I am placing it in the public domain --AlainV 02:11, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC) This cubicle measures 8 feet by 10 feet File links The following pages link... Download high resolution version (1500x900, 411 KB)clean cubicle seen from South I have taken this picture with my camera and I am placing it in the public domain --AlainV 02:16, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC) This cubicle measures 8 feet by 10 feet File links The following pages link... Download high resolution version (1500x900, 411 KB)clean cubicle seen from South I have taken this picture with my camera and I am placing it in the public domain --AlainV 02:16, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC) This cubicle measures 8 feet by 10 feet File links The following pages link... An office is a room or other area in which people work, but may also denote a position within an organisation with specific duties attached to it (see officer, office-holder, official); the latter is in fact an earlier usage, office as place originally referring to the location of one...

As a result of this, scant attention is paid, most of the time, to the design and correct installation of specially designed baffled ceilings, acoustic floor coverings, staggered corridors and tactically placed enclosed meeting rooms. Without a global approach to all these elements, the cubicle desk offers only a limited form of visual privacy and no sonic protection whatsoever, since traditional suspended ceiling tiles are insufficient to prevent noise conduction in very large office spaces, despite their being sold as "acoustic" tiles. This global approach is lacking in most installations done in large companies or large government bureaucracies. Acoustics is a branch of physics and is the study of sound, mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids. ...

More recent academic studies have noted the disadvantages that the cubicle desk has brought to American corporate culture. While effectively reducing the amount of noise and distractions in the office environment, the cubicle has also produced a negative effect in the reduced amount of person-to-person communication among office workers. This unexpected result of cubicle installations has led to declines in company-specific corporate cultures, declines in morale, and production delays. Notably, productivity declines due to cubicle desks have become a recent concern in new office designs.

The versatile cubicle walls

On the positive side the cubicle desk offers an occasion for customization by its users which is not comparable to other desk forms, past or present. The secret is that it can transform all of the walls surrounding the white-collar worker in productive work surfaces, or nooks for personal expression. Because all of the walls are within grasp or reach all of the time, and because many of them offer holes and hooks for hanging small shelves, bulletin boards or other accessories, elements which were once placed only on the horizontal surface of the desktop can be moved to the vertical surfaces all around. While the makers of cubicle desks usually employ proprietary standards for their fasteners and accessory hooks, this has not stopped the makers of small scale desktop accessories from producing and marketing myriads of pen holders, magazine racks, and other items which are made to fit the most popular brands of cubicle desk partitions. A desk is a furniture form and a class of table. ... White-collar workers perform tasks which are less physically laborious yet often more highly paid than blue-collar workers, who do manual work. ...

Note that it is also possible to create a cubicle filled office environment without the use of cubicle desks by combining traditional free standing desk forms like the pedestal desk with special types of free standing partitions. This kind of environment is often part of a general office landscaping effort which was popularized in the 1950s and the 1960s in Germany and the United Kingdom. A pedestal desk is usually a large free-standing desk made of a simple rectangular working surface resting on two pedestals or small cabinets of stacked drawers of one or two sizes, with plinths around the bases. ...

Explorations of the cubicle form

Some interesting R and D has been going on in the field of cubicles at the turn of this millennium. One of the most sarcastic critics of the cubicle has been Scott Adams, speaking through his comic strip, Dilbert. In 2001 he teamed up with the San Francisco design company IDEO to design "The perfect cubicle". It had some whimsical aspects but there were also some very sound design ideas such as an original modular approach and attention to usually neglected ergonomic details like the change in light orientation as the day advances. Similarly, Douglas Coupland has coined the phrase "veal-fattening pen," in parody of the cubicle in his novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. The phrase research and development (also R and D or R&D) has a special commercial significance apart from its conventional coupling of research and technological development. ... Thriving on Vague Objectives, the latest Dilbert book Dilbert animated series, episode 212 Dilbert is a popular American comic strip. ... IDEO is a design consultancy based in Palo Alto, CA, with other offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, London and Munich. ... Douglas Coupland (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian author and cultural commentator, raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. ... Veal is the meat of young calves, specifically the male offspring of dairy cattle, and is appreciated by people with an appreciation for its delicate taste, tender texture and nutritious qualities. ... Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, published in 1991, is the first novel by Douglas Coupland. ...

Between 2000 and 2002 IBM partnered with Steelcase, the office furniture manufacturer and did some very thorough research on the software, hardware and ergonomic aspects of the cubicle of the future (or the office of the future) under the name "BlueSpace". They produced several prototypes of this hi-tech multi screened workspace and even exhibited one at Walt Disney World. Bluespace offered movable multiple screens inside and outside, a projection system, advanced individual lighting heating and ventilation controls and a host of software applications to orchestrate everything. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) NYSE: IBM (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, NY, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, infrastructure services and consulting services. ... Steelcase is an international office furniture company. ... The Office of the future is a concept dating from the 40s. ... Between 2000 and 2002, [[IBM] partnered with Steel case, the office furniture manufacturer and did some very thorough research on the software, hardware and ergonomic aspects of the cubicle of the future (or the office of the future) under the name BlueSpace. They produced several prototypes of this hi-tech... Cinderella Castle, at the center of the Magic Kingdom, is Walt Disney World Resorts most recognizable icon Introduction Owned and operated by The Walt Disney Company, the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, USA is home to four theme parks, two water parks, several resort hotels and golf courses...

In 1994 the designer Douglas Ball planned and built several iterations of the "Clipper" or "CS-1", a "capsule" desk looking like the streamlined front fuselage of a fighter plane. Meant as a computer workstation it had louvers and an integrated ventilation system, as well as a host of built-in features typical of the ergonomic desk. An office space filled with these instead of traditional squarish cubicles would look like a hangar filled with small flight simulators. It was selected for the permanent design collection of the design Museum in the United Kingdom. The ergonomic desk is a modern desk form which is in a sense a derivative of the adjustable drawing table or drafting table of the end of the 18th century (and much of the 19th century) since its main goal is to offer the proper amount of mechanical adjustments to...

Cube farms in fiction

• Dilbert, the quintessential cube farm comic strip.
• Office Space is a film about programmers bored with their jobs working in a cube farm at a software firm.
• Tron features a massive cube farm.
• The Office television show of NBC features employees of Dunder-Milfin working in a mixture of desks and cubicles.

Thriving on Vague Objectives, the latest Dilbert book Dilbert animated series, episode 212 Dilbert is a popular American comic strip. ... Office Space is a 1999 comedy film written and directed by Mike Judge, partially based on his 1991 animated short films of the same name. ... Film refers to the celluloid media on which movies are printed. ... A programmer or software developer is someone who programs computers, i. ... A screenshot of computer software in action. ... Tron is a 1982 Walt Disney Productions science fiction movie starring Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn (and his counterpart inside the electronic world, Clu), Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley (and Tron), Cindy Morgan as Lora Baines(and Yori) and Dan Shor as Ram. ... The main cast of the American version of The Office. ...

References

• Adams, Scott.What do you call a sociopath in a cubicle? : (answer, a coworker) Kansas City, Missouri. : Andrews McMeel Pub., 2002.
• Blunden, Bill. Cube Farm. Berkeley: Apress, 2004.
• Duffy, Francis. Colin Cave. John Worthington, editors. Planning Office Space. London: The Architectural Press Ltd., 1976.
• Inkeles, Gordon. Ergonomic Living: How to Create a User-Friendly Home and Office. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
• Klein, Judy Graf. The Office Book. New York: Facts on File Inc., 1982.
• Schlosser, Julie. Cubicles: The great mistake CNNMoney.com, 2006

External links

• Herman Miller, Inc.
• CNN/Fortune-Cubicles:The great mistake

See also

• List of desk forms and types