Office Environments to Support Future Organizations

As the saying goes, to understand where you’re going, you must understand where you’ve been. Historians have variously linked the development of modern offices with the railroad industry, stock trading, insurance and finance, or government. Railroads had an impact, for example, as clerks became necessary for processing contracts governing the distribution of goods by rail. These early offices tended to be vast rooms containing row after row of free-standing desks, with only a few private offices for a sparse management layer. Thus, status-based distinctions concerning privacy and space accompanied the earliest instances of corporate offices. As more and more service industries grew to support this vast rail network and supplement the growing manufacturing sector, more managers needing office space joined the workforce. Essentially, only four developments have significantly altered these earliest office environments from the occupants ’ perspective: 1. The invention of the elevator 2. The first evolution of the open-plan office, known as the Bürolandshaft (or office landscape) movement, which began in the 1950s in Germany 3. Bob Propst’s concept of an office supporting changing work conditions with modular components, circa 1960s, designed to increase productivity, provide individual space, and increase privacy—the cubicle is a pared-down version of this view of the office 4. Ergonomic developments The elevator and advances in building materials allowed the development of skyscrapers, and the landscaped office concept addressed most of the concerns behind the current green movement. Unfortunately, the landscaped and modular-component approaches to offices were almost immediately corrupted to support technology and save space. In large measure, the white-collar factory metaphor for offices remains with us into the 21st century. Even the otherwise useful discipline of ergonomics has retained a “machine metaphor ” for assessing office occupants, although its subfields of macroergonomics and hedonomics have provided helpful, broader perspectives (Brand, 2008)