From Cracked: 6 Geniuses Who Saw Their Inventions Go Terribly Wrong
#2.Robert Propst (1921-2000)
Invented:
Revolutionary open-landscape offices.
Lived to See:
The cubicle farm.
EUREKA!
While virtually unknown to the general public, designer Robert Propst’s ideas have shaped our world, especially our offices. While working for a furniture company in the 1960s, Propst studied the workplace, finding it “tailored around equipment, rather than around the people that use the equipment,” and concluding, “today’s office is a wasteland. It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.”
Yeah, we know; we can’t imagine what that must have been like.
In 1968, he published The Office: A Facility Based on Change, which we didn’t actually read, but it gave us an excuse to take a break and watch the episode where Jim puts all of Dwight’s possessions in the vending machine and makes him buy it with nickels.
But Propst’s work led to the invention of the “Action Office,” a revolutionary open-landscape office system with reconfigurable, low dividers. It incorporated lots of ideas to make your work life more pleasant, including bigger work surfaces and adjustable height desks that would give you the option to work standing up if you felt like it. Offices all over the world started adapting the ideas right away.
CRAP!
Robert Propst was completely aware that a lot of you are thinking, “Wait a minute… that’s the asshole who came up with the cubicle?!”
While he regretted the part he played in the modern office’s “monolithic insanity,” he refused to take the blame for the soul-sapping evolution of his creation. It was a fair point. Whatever utopian workplace Propst had envisioned evolving from the Action Office was soon superseded by the ever-increasing white-collar workforce and companies that liked the idea of building much cheaper modular offices rather than permanent ones.
As more and more workspaces were jammed into offices, each cubicle became smaller and more uniform, and the idea of customization was lost. Voila, the dreaded modern cube farm, or as Propst referred to them, “hellholes” and “barren, rat-hole places.”
These days, cubicles are linked to isolation, depression, stress, contagious illnesses and countless photos of your office manager’s cats and nephews. However the Dilbert comic strip industry has been thriving ever since.