A lot of people make fun of me for reading obituaries. They think that reading death notices is somehow morbid. They mock me and tease me for having a lugubrious mien.
What they don't realize is that obituaries--especially obituaries of the non-super-famous--are two-or-three-minute summaries of lives of interesting people who did interesting things. The best of these obituaries are about people who did quotidian things--every day things--that you'd not otherwise have heard of because you're too busy living life and their accomplishments are too ordinary.
The real subject of today's post, however, is not Burt Meyer, the toy designer. It's of a guy called Robert Propst, who was the director of research at the office-furnishings maker Herman Miller.
Propst's "new vision of the workplace...radically altered the way offices looked and function." The Journal writes, "Propst saw the offices of his day—often rows of identical desks surrounded by private areas for managers and executives—as stagnant and stifling...He envisioned an office that could be more dynamic and social, that had a greater flexibility to meet the different needs people had throughout their workday.”
Propst designed offices that could be "flexible and flowing." That looked modern, comfortable, inviting and could be configured in almost as many ways as Lego blocks.
The Journal says, “Propst created Action Office as a tool of liberation, as something that was supposed to be good for people, but it turned into what he once famously called rathole places,” says Amy Auscherman, archives director at MillerKnoll, now the parent company of Herman Miller. “He had these very utopian, lofty intentions, but he didn’t account for the constraints of business and real estate. He couldn’t dictate how his system was used, and its main feature is that it can be adapted and changed to suit an organization.”
[Propst's] "annoyance with the implementation of his design led Propst to deride his own creation in the years before his death in 2000, telling the New York Times: 'The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity.'")
Propst designed offices that could be "flexible and flowing." That looked modern, comfortable, inviting and could be configured in almost as many ways as Lego blocks.
The Journal says, “Propst created Action Office as a tool of liberation, as something that was supposed to be good for people, but it turned into what he once famously called rathole places,” says Amy Auscherman, archives director at MillerKnoll, now the parent company of Herman Miller. “He had these very utopian, lofty intentions, but he didn’t account for the constraints of business and real estate. He couldn’t dictate how his system was used, and its main feature is that it can be adapted and changed to suit an organization.”
In much the same way modern holding-companies shoved the long-desk of noisy mediocrity down the throats of the agencies they stripped-mined and called their cheapness "a way to foment collaboration and communication," the "companies that purchased [Propst's] furniture—or one of the many imitations offered by his competitors—were more often drawn to his design because of economics rather than organizational psychology.
"As real-estate prices and building costs rose, Propst’s creation offered businesses an inexpensive way to reconfigure their floor plans. By using components to create small, boxy workstations, companies found they could pack more employees into tighter spaces. The cubicle as we know it was born.
[Propst's] "annoyance with the implementation of his design led Propst to deride his own creation in the years before his death in 2000, telling the New York Times: 'The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity.'")
Monolithic insanity. Eventually, it catches up with you.
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To my non-amerkin readers.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in what Lincoln once described as the "last best hope for man."
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in what Lincoln once described as the "last best hope for man."
Ad Aged will not have a post.
We will resume on Friday, if I'm not deported illegally.
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