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Propst, circa 1975 |
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| And why he wishes we'd paid no attention to him. One inventor
on the dark side of the divider. by Yvonne Abraham Yes, Bob Propst knows who Dilbert is. How could he not? As the man credited with inventing office cubicles, he's been asked often enough. Ah, Dilbert, the comic strip based on the miserable, pathetic minion with slim chances of promotion, suffering in his tiny cubicle amid a sea of tiny cubicles. Millions of office workers tape the strip to the walls of their own tiny cubicles (six by eight feet, if they're lucky), provided their companies allow such testaments to individuality. Propst has created a monster. The modern American office he envisioned as a place where productivity, if not happiness, would thrive has become exactly the kind of environment loathed by those who wear suits and collect regular paychecks. But Propst wants to make one thing perfectly clear: He does not accept the blame for the nightmare that his grand idea has evolved into. "I don't even feel faintly guilty about Dilbert," Propst says from his suburban home near Redmond, Washington. "The things expressed in that comic are the very things we were trying to relieve and move beyond. It was a Dilbert world even back then. Everything we worked toward tries to express something more interesting." "Back then" was the early Sixties, an era when offices were huge, open spaces filled with orderly rows of desks and chairs, surrounded by neat, closed-in rooms. "Those offices were devoid of the imprint of work or process," says Propst. "I call it the clean-desk syndrome. At the end of the day, ideally, you had no bodies or paper showing. It was so sterile. The CBS Building in New York was an interesting example. In there, you could not choose anything yourself, except maybe a picture of your wife or your dog." A former professor of fine arts at the University of Colorado, Propst was at the time inventing things for a wide range of companies, developing a new way to produce concrete and better seats for pilots of supersonic aircraft. D.J. DuPree, founder of the Herman Miller company, asked Propst to try his hand at furniture design, giving him and his team carte blanche to come up with whatever they thought might work. Propst began by calling upon personal experience. While working at the aircraft company Stanley Aviation, he had found the setup of the design department to be less than ideal. "Here were large numbers of intelligent people working on complex tasks, acres of them hunched over drawing boards, trying to create," he says. "It was a portrait of very expensive, critical employees working in an environment that was very much at cross-purposes." Propst immediately set about designing experimental office structures for his own creative team at Herman Miller. He'd been around companies long enough to know that the most successful allowed their workers to circulate freely. "It's truly amazing the number of decisive events and critical dialogues that occur when people are out of their seated, stuffy contexts," he says, "and moving around and chatting with each other." In addition, Propst wanted his office design to reflect larger changes in the workplace. During the 1950s, many industries had expanded enormously. Needing bigger premises, companies were forced to move or renovate, both of which meant months of downtime and enormous disruption. And once the changes were complete, there was usually little room for further growth. What Propst calls the explosion of information was also taking place. "People were being rapidly deluged with information they didn't know how to manage or purge," he says. "All kinds of interesting things came before their eyes momentarily, then got filed." Every stored piece of paper, says Propst, has but a one in 20 chance of being retrieved, so vital information that should have been kept in circulation was being lost. The prevailing environment was one in which, he says, "workers performed meaningless, cog-turning activities where they had only to execute tasks." So, in 1964, Herman Miller's Action Office system was born. It started with a huge open area, sectioned off to give workers completely enclosed spaces if needed, or semi-enclosed spaces for a more social kind of privacy. Offices were arranged in such a way that workers would be likely to have plenty of contact with each other and with management. That meant planning for communal open space, too. (Despite what the modern office has become, Propst says his aim was to get away from boxes and corridors.) In 1968, Propst modified the Action Office to make its components -- the partitions and the desks and shelves attached to them -- completely mobile, so that offices could be remade overnight rather than over months. And because of the proximity of shelves to desks, paperwork and other materials were easily accessible, not filed away in cabinets. The austere quality for which cubicle-filled offices are now criticized was entirely intentional. "We tried to create a low-key, unself-conscious product that was not at all fashionable," says Propst. "The Action Office was supposed to be invisible and embellished with identity and communication artifacts and whatever you needed to create individuation. We tried to escape the idea of being stylish, which is gone in five years. We wanted this to be the vehicle to carry other expressions of identity. That's why we provided tackboards and all kinds of display surfaces." When a member of the Herman Miller sales staff brought a plastic gorilla to his workspace, even the enlightened furniture company's management looked at him askance, but Propst insisted that this was exactly the kind of thing he had intended. There were early signs that not everybody understood. "A lot of people in the industry said, 'Where the devil is the design?' " Propst chuckles. Still, the Action Office caught on almost immediately, spreading throughout the American workplace, and spawning imitators (Propst's last count puts them at 42). But Propst's forward-thinking motives were misinterpreted by some companies, which simply crammed more workers into smaller spaces and took advantage of the system's huge potential for savings and tax breaks (laws permit businesses to write off the depreciation of cubicles much more quickly than that of traditional offices). "The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive," Propst says. "Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places." Propst marvels at the stupidity of that enterprise: After all, the Action Office began as a way to make workers' lives better, not worse. But don't think he's too cut up about it. Says Propst, "I never had any illusions that this is a perfect world." Yvonne Abraham is a staff writer for the Boston Phoenix. |
Keywords:
Robert Propst, Herman Miller, Action Office, cubicle, Dilbert